By IANS
Mumbai : IT giant Cisco System India Pvt Ltd announced a series of country-specific initiatives aimed at expanding India’s capacity to train, employ and retain highly qualified networking and systems engineers.
By establishing partnerships and opening testing facilities, Cisco aims to expand India’s networking workforce capacity to 360,000 engineers in the next five years, a six fold increase over present employment levels.
As an integral part of the training-development initiative, the company announced that two of India’s largest technology training organizations – National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) and Indian Institute of Hardware Technology (IIHT) – have become Cisco Certified Learning Solutions Partners.
With this designation, both IIHT and NIIT have joined Global Knowledge and Training Partner Ltd, a business unit of Datacraft India, to offer the complete range of authorised Cisco training materials and certifications to students and professionals in more than 200 locations throughout the country.
“Globalisation will continue to transform India’s economy and require its young workforce to develop skills that are market-driven,” said Leo Scrivner, vice president of human resources at Cisco Services.
“With these initiatives in place, we are able to ensure that our customers and partners have the resources available to train and equip thousands of motivated students in India with the knowledge and skills necessary to shape the country’s burgeoning information economy,” he added.
In concert with these new partnerships, Cisco is also announcing a major push towards increasing access to its examination facilities through its primary test-delivery partner, Pearson VUE. The company is committed to adding 150 testing facilities that meet these new requirements across India by the end of the year.
Pearson VUE would also deploy several mobile testing centres to increase access to technology in rural and underserved areas. It has recently announced that it is requiring its test centres to adopt increased security measures in order to safeguard the value of IT certifications.