Sometimes, with hard work and excitement, dreams do come true. Kelly Zapata, a young design student, is proof of this. Born in Dabeiba,  a small town in the Antioquia region of Colombia, Kelly has become a role model for her community and a source of pride for everyone who knows her. Not only has she managed to change her life, but with her mother’s help, she is creating opportunities for others.

Machine learning, metaverse and chatbots are some of the technologies that stimulate and facilitate learning in a virtual environment with great potential. Edtech startups, including some thirty unicorns, are confronting the digital divide to achieve the democratisation of knowledge thanks to the Internet and are coming up with innovations to motivate students in front of the screen.

Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc., a global leader in adaptive HR solutions, announced that BBVA is leveraging Cornerstone’s tools to develop and enhance its employee growth strategies and manage various talent areas, including recruitment, assessment, learning and mobility.

Sustainability is a fundamental part of BBVA's strategy, which involves helping customers in the transition to a green and inclusive future. In response to this challenge, the bank has made sustainability one of the key skills for its employees and has designed its own reskilling plan, identifying training needs in this area and collaborating with prestigious educational institutions such as the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Yale.

Founded in 2011, the platform by Garanti BBVA has received more than three million visitors in ten years thanks to its original offer of content and activities. The entity encourages participation and learning and preserves collective memory, which it makes available to future generations through freely accessible archives and research resources, as well as exhibits and programs.

The Ministry of Education has presented the "Vocational Training Alliance: a country strategy", which seeks to consolidate the network of joint responsibility for consolidating the transformation of Vocational Training in Spain. BBVA and more than fifty other Spanish companies, organizations and institutions, have confirmed their commitment to the plan and joined this strategic alliance.

Garanti BBVA is aware of the role that teachers play in promoting quality education. For this reason, since the restrictions began in March 2020, the bank and its ÖRAV Academy have transformed the content they offer teachers through their platform, enriching it with additional information and training apps so that teachers can adapt to the changes following the pandemic.

The Garanti BBVA Partners initiative, which was launched six years ago, continues its activities this year with a series of meetings with renowned experts. Balvinder Singh, who has extensive experience in directing business, social, cultural, media, and technological projects, was this month's guest.

On Thursday, BBVA Chairman Carlos Torres Vila attended the meeting of the Carolina Foundation Board of Trustees, which was presided by King Felipe VI, at the Royal Palace in El Pardo. The Carolina Foundation, of which BBVA has been a trustee since its inception, celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2020.

The mass closure of schools, colleges and universities in the 2019-2020 academic year proved that not all schools, teachers, students and families were ready to teach and learn online. One in ten households with school-age children have no Internet access, according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Spain's national statistical institute. Due to the pandemic, technological resources and training in using them effectively is more important than ever. The risk surrounding the digital divide is serious.

BBVA's educational project ‘Aprendemos juntos’ (We learn together) was launched on January 22, 2018 in collaboration with Spanish daily El País. Since then, it has met with one success after another. Over two and half years, more than 200 experts have worked on the ‘Aprendemos Juntos’ initiative, it has accumulated over one billion views, and it has brought together a community of four million people. On May 23rd of this year, 'Aprendemos Juntos' went one step further and premiered on the Spanish TV show 'A mi yo adolescente' (To My Teenage Self), a nine-episode series on TVE’s channel 2 that looks at what young people think about issues such as friendship, fear and love.

The BBVA Garanti securities unit has received the Turkish Markets Capital Association's Social Value award for its ground-breaking digital initiative, ‘A Different Race’ delivered together with the foundation for children with autism, Tohum Otizm Vakfı.

In the summer of 2018, Pablo Martín sequestered himself for almost 100 days in a cabin in the Swiss municipality of Montricher. His purpose: to write ‘Memories of an Old Hardhead’. At the time he would never have imagined that the plot of his novel would so closely reflect the reality of 2020.

BBVA invested 77.6 million euros in knowledge, education and culture activities in 2019, about 68 percent of the Group’s social investments. These initiatives, carried out as part of BBVA’s Community Investment Plan, benefitted 7.2 million people.

Many people are taking advantage of their time in quarantine to brush up on their knowledge, and massive online open courses (MOOCs) provide a good alternative. In this article, we describe the major platforms for online education and what they have on offer, both for professional development as well as purely for the fun of learning.

Andrew Wong is the winner of the third edition of the scholarship offered by BBVA in collaboration with The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The promising youth from the U.S. was selected among culinary students from around the world. He will complete his training at three restaurants led by chefs Mauro Colagreco, Luke Dale-Roberts and Leonor Espinosa.

For the first time — after a decision made by UNESCO in November 2019 — the International Day of Mathematics will be celebrated on March 14, 2020. Surprisingly, until now the ‘science of the sciences’ has not had its own day of formal commemoration; and the date selected is no coincidence.

According to the results of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2019, with 13 out of the world’s top 20 universities, the United States is, yet another year, the world’s academic powerhouse in computer science. Computer Science is a booming tech field. Demand for specialized talent, for example in artificial intelligence, has skyrocketed more than 400 percent since 2010.

Aspiring chefs from all around the world are encouraged to apply and compete for a chance to work at three of the best restaurants in the world with the launch of the 50 Best BBVA Scholarship 2020, organised by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants with the support of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA). Entries are now open for the initiative, which is in its third year.

'Learning Together,’ the educational program BBVA delivers in collaboration with Spanish newspaper ‘El País’ and the Santillana Foundation, continues to build on its success. The initiative was kicked-off in January 2018 and aims to promote education, positioning it as one of the basic cornerstones of our society.  In only 18 months of operation, this innovative educational program, which has hosted more than 120 guest experts representing a diverse range of fields, has reached 500 million views.