In an effort to reverse the demand-supply gap, many large global IT companies, including Cisco, IBM, HP, SAP and Microsoft, have launched training and educational programmes to help create a pool of IT professionals. All of the companies that Gulf News spoke to were focusing their education initiatives on emerging markets.
"IBM continues to invest in education in emerging markets, including the Middle East and Southeast Asia," says Nick Donofrio, IBM's executive vice-president in charge of research.
Cisco has similar initiatives. In the Middle East, it is partnering with Qatar's Silatech initiative, which aims to train 10 million infotech professionals in the region. Cisco's chairman and CEO John Chambers even sits on Silatech's board of directors. The company also has education initiatives in both Saudi Arabia and Palestine.
Cisco's growth in the region also puts pressure on the company to make sure the IT industry has qualified people, according Sam Alkharrat, Cisco's regional general manager. "In every IT project, there is a Cisco element," he says. For every 500 Cisco employees, he estimates that the company needs 10,000 trained partners.
Cisco established its networking academy 11 years ago, and currently has 158 academies with 18,000 students in 165 countries around world. Nineteen of those academies are in the Middle East. The academy takes six months to two years to complete, and classes are taken as electives in the college curriculum, Alkharrat says.
Part of the reason for Cisco's programme is sustainability. Alkharrat says the region can't continue to rely on employees from the UK and US. The region is depending on expatriate employees today because of the lack of training in general. "There are a lot of boutique programmes, but these are not mass programmes. These don't address the general problems. If you need 20,000 people next year, you're going to fall behind even faster."
SAP's focus has been very similar to Cisco, and for a lot of the same reasons. The focus is three-fold, Abouseif says. SAP is looking first to staff its own organisation. Then at the other end of the spectrum are customers who need to maintain, update and manage these systems. In between, he says, there are SAP's business partners who implement SAP with their own customers.
University alliances
To get the training they need, SAP has a university alliance programme - basically, inserting certified SAP training within the curriculum of university degrees.
"Our ambition is to have an accredited university in a major country in the GCC," Takkale says.
But making sure that people are skilled can be a double edge. While training can make an employee valuable, it can also make them valuable to someone else.
Most of the companies that Gulf News spoke to said the best way to retain employees was to maintain a high morale and a phenomenal work environment.
Kevin Scott, SAP's chief operating officer for the Mena region, says some turn-over was expected and could even be seen as an indicator that his company's training programmes were effective. "Really, if we aren't producing employees that other companies want, then there's something wrong."
By Scott ShueyChief, Business Reporter