Sometimes entrepreneurial skills are in your veins without even knowing it. But how to discover it? It’s simple — just go where your heart leads you and all opportunities will come to you naturally. That’s how Tomas being just a schooler has found his own path and grew into an entrepreneur of nowadays education: all he has done to achieve this was going to the right direction at the right time with a mission to make a change.
Tomas became a part of Junior Achievement Lithuania when he was still at school — this boy then was about 16 years old. At that time JA was organizing a Students Small Communities Program in which Tomas, together with some other friends, decided to participate. So they established an advertising agency where the main activity was to share flyers. The beginning of their first business was quite tough but, as Tomas now remembers, together they learned a lot of lessons which let them correct their mistakes. They learned how to improve their business proposals for customers as well as working methods. In the final result, they hired about 35 schoolchildren who shared flyers through their company, worked with one of the largest and oldest shopping centre in Vilnius — VCUP.
“Undoubtedly, this experience was a great chance to try myself in a business. I was fascinated by the opportunity to take all decisions by myself or with the team. It became the basis of my confidence and craving to create my own businesses, activities, and organizations. The knowledge gained from these experiences has been a huge contributor to the creation of the Turing Society, which today and my last 3 years have been my main activity.”
Turing Society is a non-profit, focused to make world class tech education available to all. The idea of Turing Society was born from a need to improve education system: “The current education system is mostly a one-way stream of information. Teachers commonly teach a class with little or no active involvement of the students“ — thinks Tomas. In Turing Society his team works with technology education, which is essential in the nowadays modern world. It is a non-profit organization, which run affordable coding workshops, courses and build communities around them. Tomas says that through their work in this field they found the key element: it is the best to let students do learning themselves.
The opportunity to study in Turing Society has all groups of age: the organization works with schools (Turing School) where their lectures are based on Harvard programmes; with universities where students can join students’ organizations (Turing Students) which provides activities regarding programming and events. What is more, they learning system is fully automatized — it means that there are no teachers, lectures or deadlines.
So how public benefits from this way of technology education? “We help a very specific group of people by giving them a very clear solution — the community. First of all, we give them an exceptional opportunity to excel at the highest level of training. We strive to ensure that every one of our students becomes the highest-level professional and educates them from the very beginning.” Tomas also claims that they often find that young students who contribute to a community have better friendships, better self-confidence and goals. Student organizations are focused on those who want to develop professionally. Turing College provides an exceptional opportunity to study in the region for the highest levels of IT science and Turing Solutions is a great opportunity for our community members to practice and find work opportunities.
As we can see, Turing Society is already making a change in the world of education. Tomas himself managed to combine his entrepreneurial skills, awareness of education system and as a result created an opportunity for everyone to be a part of a possible future way of technology education.
