Johannesburg, 26 Mar 2013
Speaking at the fifth BRICS Summit yesterday, in Durban, Sunil Joshi, CEO of Neotel, announced the company's plans to enter into an alliance with NIIT, a leading computer training and software company, to offer world-class training solutions to organisations, communities and students in South Africa.
Expanding on the company's foray into technology-enabled education provision, Joshi said: "Neotel's partnership with NIIT is an important step in enabling the education and development of key skills in the country. It is also an excellent example of collaboration between BRICS member organisations leveraging skills for the benefit of communities."
Through the alliance, NIIT will leverage Neotel's extensive fibre broadband infrastructure for education and training purposes, mainly in the fields of ICT, banking, finance, business process optimisation (BPO) and e-literacy, with the provision of accredited, non-accredited and short-term skills upgrade programmes.
Commenting on the partnership, Ajai Lal, Chief Business Officer, International Education Business from NIIT, said: "This partnership with Neotel is yet another step towards NIIT's endeavour to develop talent and create an employable workforce across the globe. Through this partnership, we aim to build a larger pool of skilled manpower in South Africa, ready to take up challenging assignments across the world."
Neotel and NIIT are currently focusing on formalising the roll-out of education and knowledge centres, which will be used to deliver custom-built training programmes to corporate executives and students. Through NIIT's established curriculum, future students will be trained on a variety of environments on an equally wide variety of hardware platforms. Courseware and training will be enabled through Neotel's broadband network connectivity services, data centres and hosting and cloud-based services.
The programmes are designed to build the requisite computing skills for students to get a job in today's world and to help self-employed professionals carry out their work more effectively.
"We are committed to delivering innovative solutions which will have a significant positive impact on the everyday lives of ordinary South Africans. This important initiative we believe will help to address the skills shortage and growing need especially in IT," added Joshi.
Neotel and NIIT expect to be in a position to formally launch their first education centre in the second half of 2013 and look forward to making further announcements in that regard.
Share