Internships for 10,000 IT graduates announced
ISLAMABAD, May 27 2006: Minister for Information Technology Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari on May 26 announced 10,000 internships for young IT graduates to help fill the gap between demand and supply of human resource in the local industry. The Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), a subsidiary of the ministry of information technology, has already run a similar programme very successfully and out of 2,500 promising IT graduates who were offered internship through this programme, more than half have already been absorbed in the industry.
He was speaking at an opening of a state-of-the-art computer lab set up by the information technology ministry at Government Polytechnic Institute for Women H-8. The lab consisting of 120 computers and six teachers has been completed in two years at a cost of Rs16.71 million. The information technology ministry bore the entire project cost while the lab would be run and maintained by the education ministry from June 2006 onward.
Awais Leghari said the government considered youth as the real asset and the richest resource available to the country and was keen to provide them quality education as well as competitive employment opportunities. He said his ministry would offer 200 scholarships to students from the backward areas and rural fold for higher education in the IT and telecom disciplines among four top universities of the country.
About 2,500 students would be trained for three months before appearing in an entry test for admission to four tier-one universities, and up to 200 students who qualify for admission would be given fully funded scholarships by the ministry, he said. The minister also urged youth, especially girls, to study information technology as it had emerged as the most leading sector in terms of growth and job opportunities. There have been at least 100,000 jobs created in this sector during the last two to three years and the trend is picking up with the industry requiring8,000 professionals every new month to fill up key positions, he said.
Mr Leghari said the annual turnout of the technical education graduates was also around 5,500 who all needed to be equipped with modern technology tools to make them more effective. For achieving the objective of increasing competence and employment opportunities of our polytechnic diploma holders, it is necessary that the polytechnic institutes should not only make their students IT literate but information technology should be integrated in the core disciplines of the polytechnics, he said.
He said the information technology ministry had also set up computer labs at 73 federal and cantonment garrison schools, colleges, 25 PAF colleges and three cadet colleges. Similarly the ministry has also completed targeted IT HRD programmes that include training of 1,400 students in inter- networking (Cisco) engineering, 760 students in legal transcription, 1,100 students in medical transcription and over 500 students in quality control area, he said.
Speaking on the occasion, college principal Fareeda Javed said the computer lab was spread over six departments, including computer science, electronics, dress design, commerce and office management and architecture. As part of the project, a campus-wide local area network facility with provision of Internet had also been set up while an important component of the project is to train the existing staff in modern day computing technologies to ensure capacity building of the institute.
Source: Dawn
Date:5/27/2006
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