One that stands out from the rest

Jesús Sotomayor recently received a Professional Certificate in Digital Transformation, which consists of five online courses, in Spanish at age 76. After earning a doctorate in engineering, he founded a wireless networking company over twenty years ago in his native Mexico. Furthermore, Sotomayor serves on the boards of several firms to give advice regarding the technology sector.

MIT Professional Education uses the latest research and literature for professional scholars, and Sotomayor was able to take advantage of the Professional Certificate to evolve his usage of the newest technology and practices. “I hate obsolescence, and the only way to stay up-to-date is to be close to academic research,” he explains in an interview with MIT News.

It is important to be a lifelong learner in today’s fast-paced environment. Sotomayor’s perspective is that one must be aware of how much they do not know and have enough humility to seek this knowledge to remain competitive. After learning about cloud services with MIT Professional Education, he began working with Amazon Web Services to develop applications.

Accessibility of MIT Professional Education

MIT Professional Education’s online professional certificate gave Jesús Sotomayor the flexibility to access materials whenever and wherever he was in the world, and to review contents on demand. But even more alluring was the choice of five languages from which to take Digital Transformation courses, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. Sotomayor chose to learn and engage with faculty and fellow professionals in his Spanish, his native language.

The nature of MIT Professional Education’s format allows participants from all around the world to learn with renowned MIT instructors. While there are some on-campus events offered to program participants, the vast majority of the learning is completed in an online format. However, our Beyond Online methodology allows participants to maintain the feeling of a genuine classroom.

As our learners come from various backgrounds, both professionally and culturally, they are often also teachers for each other, especially in discussion forums. Sotomayor commented that he owes much of his success with MIT Professional Education to his international peers who also participated virtually from around the world. “They were my professors as well. The quality of the program should not only be measured by the strength of the faculty, but by the other participants, who challenged and inspired me,” says Sotomayor.

Coming full circle

Jesús Sotomayor has put his newfound knowledge to work rapidly. The material discovered with Bhaskar Pant, executive director of MIT Professional Education and instructor of Cultural Awareness for Global Business, helped Sotomayor improve comprehension of cross-cultural relationships in an international business context. Learning about cloud computing systems and platforms inspired him greatly, as these can serve as a liberation from the limitation of maintaining physical data centers. Sotomayor recognizes the unique opportunity for new technologies like blockchain ledgers to transform developing economies like Mexico’s, where 50 percent of financial transactions are informal.

Furthermore, Jesús Sotomayor has personal reasons for being a lifelong learner. He states that “I wanted to earn that MIT certificate to show it to my grandchildren. I want to leave them the legacy that their grandpa, at 76 years old, is still studying, and I want to leave this message for my family, for my employees and colleagues, for my partners and for my students: In matters of education, there is no point of saturation.”

This is a summary of an article which appeared in MIT News. Click here for the full story.

Discover more about MIT Professional Education’s program offerings here.