SageTea Software has teamed up with Willis College Ottawa Campus, one of the nation’s premiere business and technical colleges, to provide training in SageTea’s application-building software – Text-to-Software®.

Over the past few months, Willis College IT students have been learning how to create software using SageTea’s technology.  Willis College’s President and CEO, Rima Aristocrat, (shown above with SageTea’s David Long) felt that partnering with SageTea Software was “part of Willis’ continuing effort to improve the value of its technology diploma program….”

Rima Aristocrat went on to say in her speech that, “SageTea will be the first active company to participate as a member of the Willis Software Program Advisory panel.  This will result in a coordinated effort between Willis and SageTea to define subject focus and educational content that will be integrated into the software development courses.”

And part of this collaboration was the establishment of the “Award for Excellence in Software Design”.  The award will go to the student who has the best final project in their academic program using SageTea technology and comes with a prize of $1000., funded jointly by Willis College and SageTea Software.

At the Willis College Graduation Ceremony, June 2, 2017, SageTea’s CEO, David Long and President, Scott MacGregor, were present as part of the award announcement.  The students being trained on Text-to-Software®, and who will then be placed at SageTea as co-ops, were not graduating that night but David Long and Scott MacGregor attended as part of the Willis community.

After Rima Aristocrat’s introduction of the new award, David Long spoke about his history in IT and how he invented the SageTea process, Text-to-Software®.  David Long went all the way back to his early days in the Canadian Army Reserves, as a nod to George Sparks, Canada’s oldest WWII veteran who was also attending.  Willis College Ottawa Campus, as part of its dedication to supporting veterans, announced in March the establishment of the George L. Sparks Veteran Friendly Learning Centre.

SageTea has a month to wait before its Willis College co-ops arrive for their work placement.  Everyone at SageTea is looking forward to the new faces and especially that they come trained on Text-to-Software® and ready to dive into the work.

And learning Text-to-Software®’s natural language processing (NLP) application development is a win-win for the students.  They learn how to use a valuable software application designed for easily creating other applications and are better trained for jobs at companies using this software.

This is a new way of tailoring students for the workforce is one that both SageTea and Willis College are looking forward to continuing for many years to come.