Three of the best ICT students in South Africa fly to China this week to highlight the need for a global workforce fit for a connected world.

The students will pit their skills and knowledge against the best teams from around the world during a two-day ICT laboratory challenge.

The team undertook a gruelling selection process to test their knowledge of IP and IT subjects, which was also entered by over 7,500 ICT students around the world.

Huawei, best known for its mobile phones, hosted 32 teams including six overseas teams, from across the globe at the inaugural event at its Shenzhen HQ, including representatives from Western Europe, Australia, Pakistan, and Russia.

The South Africa delegation will participate in an eight-hour practical challenge that rigorously tests their knowledge of routers, switching, security, WLAN, plus cloud, storage, and Big Data.

The students are member of the Huawei ICT Academy, a worldwide not-for-profit programme that encourages the next generation of ICT professionals for a better connected world.

South Africa faces a crisis in digital skills, and is without sufficient numbers of software engineers to build a digital economy(1).

Lintuo Wu, Huawei ICT Academy director, said: “The Huawei ICT Academy hopes to influence the upskilling of South Africa’s ICT workforce through educational opportunities and the creation of a better global ICT talent ecosystem.”

Pallavi Malhotra, Huawei ICT Academy manager, said: “More and more university students, and those wanting to embark on an ICT career realise they need the full suite of academic knowledge and practical know-how to enter the current ICT workplace. Huawei ICT Academy qualifications provide the foundations, from routers or switching, to cloud computing, or security, to help students find those roles. We can also provide a career path for ICT professionals right up to certification, to enable them to aim for middle to senior level positions.”

Reference:

1.SA Faces ICT skills crisis, IT-Online, 19 July 2016 https://it-online.co.za/2016/07/19/sa-faces-ict-skills-crisis/

About Huawei ICT Academy

The Huawei ICT Academy is part of a number of Huawei outreach programmes to enrich life and improve efficiency around the world.Huawei works with over 200 global colleges and universities, including the University of Reading in the UK, University of Sydney in Australia, University of Alicante in Spain, National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences (FAST-NU) in Pakistan, and University of São Paulo in Brazil City University of Hong Kong, and has trained more than 200,000 students up to 2016.

To date, Huawei has provided cloud services to over 2,500 customers in the government and public utility, telecom, energy, and finance sectors across 108 countries and regions, deploying more than 1.4 million virtual machines.  It has also built 660 data centers worldwide, including 255 cloud data centers. Its ICT solutions, products, and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world's population. With more than 170,000 employees, Huawei is committed to enabling the future information society, and building a better connected world. See: www.huaweiacad.com, https://www.facebook.com/huawei.certifications and https://twitter.com/HWCertification