De Roche has been involved in IT for over 30 years, and most of this time has been in the IT training field.
Based in Cape Town, she is currently employed by Laragh Skills (formerly SmartForce Africa), and has been with the company for over 10 years, first in the role of regional manager, and currently as general manager. Laragh Skills is a distributor for SkillSoft, the world`s largest e-learning company.
De Roche has a long association with the Computer Society of SA (CSSA). She has been on the committee of the Western Cape Chapter for six years, three of which she served as chairman. In this capacity, she served on the CSSA executive committee, and last year became vice-president of professional development.
Speaking of her objectives for her presidential term, De Roche said learning and people development is her passion as well as her profession, from school level through to professional. She pointed out that she has held the professional development portfolio at CSSA for the past year, and added: "We welcome the high level learnerships recently announced by ISETT SETA and Wits University, and support this and other programmes. However, we also recognise the importance of developing ICT skills at community level, in order to help bridge the digital divide, so I will keep the emphasis going on our two major developmental projects, the Computer Olympiad, which this year attracted entries from over 12 000 students, and the International Computer Driving Licence (ICDL), which will shortly welcome its 100 000th student."
De Roche is also on the organising committee for the World Conference of Computers in Education 2005, which is run by CSSA in conjunction with the International Federation for Information Processing.
"This international conference is coming to Africa for the first time, which is real recognition of the CSSA and the work that we do. We expect around 800 attendees from all over the world."
Transformation in the ICT sector is also a key objective for De Roche. "I am only the second woman president in the CSSA`s 47-year history, and personally recognise the need to bring into the industry people of all races and genders as a priority to ensure growth in the sector. We have made significant strides over the last year through our support of the ICT charter process, where we have permanent places on the core task team, while our own organisation has become a reflection of the dynamics of the nationwide transformation process."
The Computer Society is an association of people working in, or interested by, computers and information and communications technology. Membership is open to all, with different grades according to qualifications and experience. The CSSA holds regular seminars on subjects of interest to its members. For more information, visit www.cssa.org.za.
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