March 01, 2007

Can the Cisco® Networking Academy® Program be used as a strategic tool by local and national governments to help boost employment and productivity? For many government bodies, this certainly seems to be the case.

Since its inception a decade ago this year, the Networking Academy program has signed 105 official memoranda of understanding with public sector organizations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa alone.

To get an idea of the value that the public sector gets from working with the Networking Academy program, News@Cisco talked to Arturo García Ceva, vocational training director of the Regional Employment Service of the Ministry of Employment and Women for the Community of Madrid, Spain.

In what capacity are you currently working with the Networking Academy program?

Arturo García: Last year we announced the opening of a 6000m2 IT training center called Madrid Sur, in Getafe, south of Madrid, which aims to provide technology and telecommunications job skills to 2500 unemployed people a year.

We launched Madrid Sur in collaboration with five global IT businesses: Cisco, IBM, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle. Between them, these companies will help us provide 180 courses across 49 specialist technology and telecommunications areas.

Cisco will be providing networking skills training through the Networking Academy program. A Madrid-based Local Academy called the Escuela Superior de Formacíon will provide the trainers and lab equipment to run six free CCNA® courses a day on the Madrid Sur campus.

What employment challenges does the Madrid community face and how can training in general, and the Networking Academy program in particular, help you overcome them?

Arturo García: Right now the employment situation in Madrid is quite good. In December 2006 we had just over 211,500 unemployedssss, but we need more workers.

We can get some of these from immigration and others from incorporating more women into the workplace, and in fact within our annual EUR€500 million budget we have a number of specific initiatives aimed at increasing the population of female workers.

Two big challenges we face are that we have a large number of young people leaving university and not many people who have professional training. This means the people who are hardest to find jobs for are often those who are the most qualified: university graduates.

What we need to do is ensure they have access to training which is geared towards the requirements of the job market. So it makes sense to offer vocational training that can lead to official certification and that is run by a recognized technology provider.

What kinds of people have access to these courses and what difference does it make to their chances of getting a job?

Arturo García: They would need to have some basic knowledge of IT, either from having done a technology course previously or through experience gained learning specific applications or doing a degree in business studies or even humanities.

They would also need to have a given level of English. Most university graduates who want to work in IT and telecommunications would fit this profile.

Once someone has gone through one of our training courses, they are fairly easy to find a job for. We provide a job-finding service and currently place around 50 percent of jobseekers within six months.

At Madrid Sur we hope to raise this proportion to 90 percent since we will be carrying out training which has been put together in collaboration with the IT sector, which itself has a high demand for skilled people.

What we have tried to do at Madrid Sur is create a situation where we work in collaboration with training organizations and employers to identify where skills are needed and then guide jobseekers to acquire those skills through the appropriate training courses.

How does this collaboration help improve women's chances of getting jobs in IT?

Arturo García: Currently the proportion of women in the workforce is around 45 percent but in our courses more than 60 percent of the intake is female, which is encouraging and leads us to think that we might be able to elevate the level of women workers to 50 percent or higher.

We are hoping to get women to represent up to 65 percent of our intake. The participation of women in these courses could even be higher since IT is a sector where women are still very under-represented.

What sort of impact can IT skills training have on regional and national competitiveness?

Arturo García: We are well aware that knowledge workers have a multiplying effect on competitiveness and productivity and so I think it is strategically fundamental to be able to create high levels of IT skills in the workforce.

Underscoring this point, within the Community of Madrid we have identified IT and telecommunications as one of two strategically important industry sectors that need to be fostered through the provision of skilled, qualified workers.