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CTU wins Microsoft award

By Charity Mohajane
Johannesburg, 07 Nov 2012

CTU Training Solutions has won the Microsoft Gold Learning Partner of the Year Award for 2012.

CTU won the award because of the role it is playing in the training and development of ICT professionals countrywide through private-public partnerships like the MICT Seta and Microsoft partnership.

According to Ronald Meeske, CEO of CTU, CTU is passionate about the development of ICT professionals, and through its career division, CTU sees individuals or organisations enrolling to update their ICT skills. CTU focuses on two elements: the qualification element and the international certification element, he said.

In 2011, CTU and Microsoft partnered with the SAPS to address the level of digital literacy in the police service. The trainee-becomes-trainer initiative saw SAPS personnel graduate from the programme to become trainers to their colleagues. It has also rolled out an empowerment programme at an FET college in Umtata to train facilitators in end-user computing.

CTU as a training provider in the ICT training and development market started as a small training centre with only two lecture rooms; 25 years later, it now employs over 220 staff and has a national footprint of branches in 14 locations nationwide.

For CTU, winning the Microsoft award means Microsoft recognises it as a strategic partner and also acknowledges the contribution it has made to the ICT learning field. Through this recognition, CTU has now partnered with a higher-end IT company, Inobits, which will provide it with access to high-level facilitators known as consultant Microsoft certified trainers. The trainers will assist CTU providing higher-level training or the 400/500 level of competency training, said Meeske.

CTU competed with Bytes People Solutions and Torque IT in the Microsoft awards, and this has helped it to mature as a company and it would like to grow even further, said Meeske. However, there are many challenges in the country, such as high unemployment and the level of ICT in schools, which CTU would like to penetrate, he continued.

Going forward, CTU will launch a cloud campus in March 2013, which will run on Microsoft Lync with the aim of delivering programmes to all its campuses from a centralised location. It also aims to drive other Microsoft technologies and prepare all its career students in the use of these technologies immediately. CTU would also be active in the empowerment of FET colleges and would like to get involved in the Microsoft IT academies in schools as part of its future goals, Meeske concluded.

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