Source: Times of India, International Report Section

Call it the gift of the Nile. Egypt has been giving the IT industry many skilled professionals. But building a workforce capable of meeting increasing global demands of ITS/ITES requires investment. With Egypt setting its goals on becoming one of the top five offshoring destinations in the world by 2012, building capacities for this comes as top priority.

Egyptian universities graduate more than 330,000 students annually ready to be integrated in the work force. Surely impacts the sustainability and the growth prospects of any offshore delivery center to be established in Egypt.

EduEgypt, a novel initiative, is the fruit of collaboration between Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and Ministry of Higher Education. The aims to equip young graduates with necessary basic skills needed for the working world. Phase one of the project was implemented in two universities and five faculties. 3,000 IT professionals were trained, 1,700 of whom were employed through the Information Technology Institute (ITI), the developer and implementer of this initiative.

In Phase two, the program was implemented in six universities and 17 faculties in five cities. The program introduces students to soft as well as technical skills and is offered in faculties of Commerce and other non-scientific based faculties.

The initiative also envisages a two pronged approach: introducing business process outsourcing (BPO) as a curriculum topic in select university faculties under the University Intervention Program and involving world class providers and potential customers of the talent pool to shape the content and prepare qualified trainers.

For the academic year 2008-2009, three top global IT/ITES players - IBM Daksh, Infosys and firstsource - have collaborated with the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), the initiative’s sponsor, to develop the curricula and coach trainers to deliver effectively to students.

A robust testing and certification framework has been developed in collaboration with renowned HR and testing providers such as Hewitt and Eduquity. The plan is to test 12,000 students.

Another level of qualification for our ICT workforce comes through the professional training programs implemented by the ITI and National Telecommunication Institute (NTI). Both organizations implement intensive programs in collaboration with multinational technology providers in tracks needed by the industry.

Graduates of these programs are certified by the multinational corporations and are employed locally and sought after for their professionalism. Recently, ITI'S professional training program embarked on a Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) with Satyam and Wipro.

An agreement signed in 2006 between ITI and Aptech entailed collaboration in the filed of e-learning by providing train the trainers (ToT) programs and building the capacity of ITI’s e-learning platform.