NGO, UWI students help migrant community with resume generation

Women-Owned Media and Education Network (Women) and La Casita Hispanic Cultural Centre are working with UWI students who have developed a bilingual website with voice-powered resume generator for Spanish-speaking communities in Trinidad and Tobago.

EmpleaTT is a project done by a group of year-two students of UWI’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty.

Group leader Jade Lalla explained EmpleaTT is a community service learning project in which the students had to find an issue within a local community and develop a solution.

She told WMN one of her relatives works with UNHCR and another has friends in the Spanish-speaking community, so she knew there were language barriers preventing Spanish-speaking people from creating resumes and accessing jobs.

As a result, the students came up with a bi-lingual, voice-powered resume generator.

Shiva Ramlal, the website developer said EmpleaTT has real-time translation of Spanish to English with the option to adjust the dialects of the transcription model for both English- and Spanish-speakers to get a more accurate output.

There is also a resume builder, a cover letter generator, a speech-to-text option so information could be input verbally, seven templates, an option to upload a photo and the finished document can be downloaded in .pdf and .doc.

Once they decided on the project, they reached out to their project supervisor, Cuban-born Lucia Cabrera-Jones, who was the co-founder of Women.

Cabrera-Jones, who is also a chemical engineer, said her organisation got involved to keep helping women and girls in communities across TT, including the migrant community, and to advocate for youth integration by engaging university students projects.

She said, “If you have to send a resume to an employer, how would you do that if you do not speak the language? So it’s a tool to help create part of the documentation you have to submit to the employer.”

She said because her NGO works extensively with migrants who speak Spanish, the website benefits her beneficiaries. As a result, Women partnered in this project with the students.

“This was definitely necessary. So many of our beneficiaries have lost working opportunities because they don’t have the ability to sit and write a resume. They don’t have to wait for somebody to instruct them on how to write a resume, for someone who speaks English to help them or come to us to assist them. They will have it at their fingertips.

She said Women and La Casita provided feedback and suggestions to enhance the functionality and features of the website to make it more user-friendly. Women will also advertise the website to local and migrant communities, and track its impact and the usage so the NGO can give feedback to keep improving it.

Lalla explained the name EmpleaTT was taken from the verb emplear, which meant to employ in Spanish. The website, she said, saved a lot of time and energy.

“When you sit down to create your own resume without this website, you’ll have to spend time looking for a template, thinking where you want your information placed on the template, how you want to say everything – the grammar and the vocabulary you want to use.

“Whereas, with this website, all you have to do is input your own information in layman’s terms and the AI tool integrated into the website will professionally format the language, the tone and the overall resume.”

She said English-speakers can use it as well, and several of her fellow students are using it as they search for internships during their vacation.

Lalla hopes EmpleaTT becomes an accessible tool to streamline the resume-creation process to everyone in TT, even those who may not be well-educated and find it difficult to get the professional jargon right.

Ramlal added, “We intend on supporting the website maintenance and if we can expand, I think we may want to develop the website further, maybe make it able to specifically understand Trini dialect.”

They are also discussing expanding into other languages.