This week Infor, Inc. held its biannual user conference, Inforum, in New York City. As Infor invests in new verticals for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), it also invests in people. Through the Infor Education Alliance Program, college and university students are receiving hands-on experience specific to running a business in today’s tech-savvy environment.

At the event, Martine Cadet, senior director of Education Alliances at Infor, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team to explain the program’s benefits for a diverse student population. Cadet sees firsthand the blossoming results of women being encouraged in the tech field, as well as a growing gap between in-school training and real-world experience.

This week, theCUBE chose to highlight Cadet as our Woman in Tech of the Week.

Partnering for success

Cadet began the interview by explaining her role and what the program is trying to achieve.

“Infor has brought me on to partner with colleges and universities on a global level. So what we do in layman’s terms is we invest in their schools. We give them our software, our technologies; we provide mentorship and support so that they can integrate our technology into the classroom.

“Think back to when you were in school. There was a lot of theory. We learned a lot of different things. But when you started your full-time job, how much of that could you apply day one? So what we’re hoping to do is close that gap in what happens in the classroom versus what an industry needs … when they hire talent. Do the students know the industry language? Do they understand how software really helps the company meet its business goals? We partner with our schools and colleges by providing our experts to actually work with those professors to teach and train them so they impart that knowledge on to the students.”

Bringing excitement to the classroom for ERP

Vellante asked Cadet how the company gets the students excited about the program. She talked about how the program sets students up for success.

“That’s a challenge … ERP is much more complex, but it also makes it much more significant. If you know that there is a student who wants to be a business executive or perhaps they want [to know] how to run their business at some point, they’re going to have to use ERP software in order to run their business effectively. Technology is becoming the backbone of every organization, and ERP sits at the heart of that. … We’ll work with a business school or the college of engineering, giving them our Mongoose [Infor’s application development framework] and technology stack, so they can build some really interesting apps to solve, perhaps, their own local issues and their own local problems and learn ‘How do I actually rapidly create an application using an industry ERP software?’

“The reality is when a student graduates and they get a job and go into the engineering department … a company can’t wait for months and months and months for that app to actually be built. Tools like Mongoose really help fast-track them to where they need to be from a business perspective.”

The catalyst to learning

Vellante asked Cadet about the driving catalyst to begin the program, launched at the last Inforum 2014. Cadet explained how the program began and expanded.

“For this program, we benefited from having a CEO that believes in that vision and the value of what it is to partner with colleges and universities. This was essentially his idea, and so [back then] we launched with five-member institutions, which was pretty good in a pretty short time frame. At that time, we had about 20 solutions to provide to schools. Fast forward to now, we’ve got 13 member institutions. We are global. We have one in China, one in Italy. We are looking to expand even more.

“We’ve learned a ton in terms of what the schools need, what students are looking for and how to do a better job of closing the chasm of what ERP is, because it is a pretty complex thing for a professor to get their mind around well, and ‘How is this a benefit to my school?’

“We need people who can actually graduate … pay back their loans in five to 10 years. How do we help students who are competing with people who have experience, who have been in an industry for quite some time? Really close that gap so they can land not just a job but a job that pays them well and enables them to move forward with their future.”

The diversity and training gaps

Both Gilbert and Vellante addressed the gender gap in technology and the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in general. Cadet addressed what she sees as part of the challenge.

“It’s challenging, but if you look at the number of women who graduate from colleges, we’re actually starting to outpace men in a lot of different ways. The challenges when you look within traditional STEM and science kind of fields — it’s dropped. With our program, we do target schools like City University of New York and Pace [University] in addition to Princeton, who has worked with us as well. We are seeing less of that issue. We have a good number of women, as well as a good number of minorities, in our program.

“I think part of the challenge is, and I think this goes beyond women, a lot of students are in classes, but what you learn versus what happens in a day-to-day job are not necessarily the same thing. With these practical-experience courses, not only do you get the theory but you get to apply it and determine, while you are in school, is this really the track I want to go down … [the program] helps kids to understand what it is that they have actually picked early on so they can make changes.

“I think from a STEM perspective, for women it’s the support. So you can train somebody and teach them all the core concepts; but is the industry as welcoming to women and people of color, and do you know difference? Not always, so it depends on where you are … I think that is also a real concern.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE