Infosys Technologies Ltd (ITL), an information disaster recovery centre is the latest big ICT firm to settle in Mauritius. It will announce its future developments today in the presence of Mr S. Gopalakrishnan, Deputy Managing Director & Chief Operating Officer and Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai, Chief Financial Officer of Infosys. ITL has already taken on around 10 highly qualified Mauritians and it is soon going to recruit a much larger number of Mauritian staff.

If there has been a lot of effort to cater for the needs of firms like Infosys, the fact remains that, by 2006, the targets of 3,000 ICT specialists and 10,000 professionals will most probably not be met. However the authorities have not remained idle.

A national strategy to promote e-education and e-training to ?harness the enormous potential of communication technologies for the developmental needs of the country? has been set up by a task force since 2001. ?For Mauritius to become a cyber island, we need a strong human resources base,? says Raj Makoond, director of the Joint Economic Council (JEC) and member of the task force on e-education and e-training. After analysing the level of ICT skills in Mauritius, the population was divided into three segments: students, the working community and the public. Different skill levels were established ranging from the lowest level-computer awareness to the highest level-IT specialists. In between, the levels are computer literacy (level 2), computer proficiency (level 3), computer studies at O-level (level 4), computing at A-level (level 5), professionals/graduates (level 6) and specialists/post-graduates (level 7).

Presently 20 800 people (about 6,600 being teachers) have been trained under the Computer Proficiency Programme(CPP). They have reached a level where they understand the functions of a computer system, use multimedia tools for presentations, produce documents and organize data. Using the Internet and mail programmes is also on the syllabus of ICT skills (level 3). As Raj Lutchmeah, Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) executive director explains, ?It?s the people who drive our cyber city so we need to have appropriately trained personnel. But as in any sector, the level of training is not heterogeneous.?

After quantity comes quality

Now that the quantitative aspect of the training is being looked after, with nearly 100 private institutions giving ICT or ICT-related courses, the quality and standards of the programmes are the next issue being tackled. The project, piloted by the National Accreditation & Equivalence Council started a few weeks ago. ?The institutions were contacted and they have responded,? says Raj Lutchmeah, adding that ?details of over 70 programmes have been obtained and a technical committee comprising the TEC, the UTM and UOM and the Mauritius Qualifications Authority is working on them.? Thus the private institutions should soon be categorised as per the 7 levels of ICT training, their quality assured and their programmes aligned with the national qualifications framework.

Hootesh Ramburn, director of the CPP project, points out that it is encouraging that people want to pass exams in ICT. ?For the first time, the University of Mauritius is proposing exams for courses it does not offer, meaning that people who have followed the CPP can pass an exam and obtain a certificate.? This started 2 months ago, and every month 100 people sit the level 3 examinations.

As for ICT training of employees, things are moving at a slower pace and on a much smaller scale. For example, 450 employees of the Central Electricity Board were trained by the NPCC in 15 days for basic ICT skills, 160 employees of the Sugar Insurance Fund Board and also 18 employees of the Médine Sugar Estate followed other courses. A report on ?job-related training for the ICT sector? is right now under study for implementation, which may help increase the number of employees trained.

It seems that the problem is not so much training a large number of people in computer proficiency, but rather producing enough people having tertiary level qualifications (levels 6 & 7). Indeed, the forecast of the task force is that by 2005 there will be only 305 ICT specialists (postgraduates) and 3 611 ICT professionals (graduates), representing only 10% and 36% of the projected manpower requirement by 2006.One of the causes may be an overestimation of the number of students taking computing at A-level. The forecast was for 2,000 students, but, according to 2002 figures, only 496 students chose computing. And since physics at HSC level is a requirement for entry to a number of ITC courses, the ?near static interest amongst students in physics is a major cause for concern.?

Re-orientate to meet current needs

When questioned about this gap, Raj Lutchmeah explained that ?the estimates were made in 2001 and since then things have changed a lot. For example, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) such as call centers have taken on more importance and so we have to re-orientate ourselves to meet the current needs. It is an ongoing challenge to ensure that we have people with the right skills to man our continuously evolving ICT sector?

Now that we have a great quantity of people trained to be computer proficient, the question is at what level does that place them in the ?cyber-work force?? Hootesh Ramburn explains: ?there are different posts in the ICT sector, but people having followed the CPP have a high enough level of ICT skills to be operators in call centres or to hold a post of data-entry for example. But of course, sometimes they need other financial or linguistic skills to be taken on.?

It seems that the main aim for the moment is to train a great mass of people to learn computer basics but the problem of producing enough professionals and specialists is still an ongoing issue if Mauritius is to cater for specific posts needing a highly trained workforce.