Neotel, together with its partner National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa (Nemisa), has officially launched The Neotel Telecommunications Academy. At a launch event attended by a wide range of industry stakeholders, the chief executive of Isett SITA, Oupa Mopaki presented the academy with an accreditation certificate.

The Neotel Academy, which is managed by Nemisa, is run in collaboration with leading industry partners such as Nokia Siemens Networks, Cisco Systems and Huawei Technologies. Each of the partners provides access to propriety curriculum, training materials, equipment, trainers as well as internship opportunities. On completion of the course, the learners are fully able to immediately join the industry.

"The establishment of an academy constitutes Neotel's own response to the critical ICT skills shortage. Our aim is to develop a gene pool of expertise in response to the current and future skills needs and competency gaps of the growing South African telecommunications market. This has been achieved by designing and delivering a high-quality telecommunications engineering programme in collaboration with leading industry partners," said Ajay Pandey, CEO and MD of Neotel.

A pilot project for the development of the academy was launched in February 2007. About 80 applicants went through a stringent screening process which resulted in the selection of 10 students. "We recruited the best of the graduates to go through the initial pilot project focused on the telecommunications component of the ICT sector with particular emphasis on internet protocol technology as it has cross over relevance to sub-sectors such as broadcasting and IT," said Pandey. "We are very proud of the successful completion of this pilot project which has now seen birth to the programme we launch today."

The demand has already grown tremendously with over 600 applications for 2008 of which 26 students were selected. "It is our objective to enhance this programme even further, creating an ICT Engineering Programme that will cater for telecommunications engineering, broadcast engineering and network engineering," said Pandey.

In launching the academy, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications Vadi Ismail expressed parliament's appreciation for the collaborative effort to redress the challenge of ICT skill development.