"From the first moment we said yes," said the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Ernesto Murro, yesterday, after the signing of the agreement between the National Institute of Employment and Vocational Training (Inefop) and the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (Cuti), which aims to increase employment in the sector. This agreement will enable the granting of 1,000 scholarships for adults who want to be trained in programming, as a complement to the Ceibal Youth to Program Plan project.
The project is called b-IT and is constituted as a training program for employment in Information Technology (IT) aimed at people across the country who are over 18 years of age and have at least fourth year of secondary school passed.
In general terms, the project aims to contribute to the development of the training and labour supply in IT and "influence the aspirational market" of young workers, based on a training proposal that "raises the levels of labour inclusion in the industry and in companies with intensive use of Information Technologies". In addition, a space is offered to integrate more women, people who want to retrain or are disabled and other groups with difficulties in accessing employment.
In the first phase, up to 1,000 young people and/or workers in the process of retraining in programming will be trained online, through modules with a diversified offer of courses that will have different lengths and hourly loads depending on the career that each student selects.
Although the agreement will have a total duration of 15 months, students will have nine months of courses and one month of evaluation and monitoring of projects. It is estimated that the dedication requirement will be 15 hours per week, both online and offline.
The project also includes a second phase that foresees the continuation of the training received by the students in the first phase, although this is not included in the agreement signed yesterday nor in its budget of 1.3 million pesos.
In spite of this, Inefop committed itself to continue training the graduates of phase one, "without prejudice to the outcome of the final evaluation of the project" for those who wish to obtain the qualification of IT analyst.
The president of Cuti, Leonardo Loureiro, acknowledged that "it was quite difficult to reach a content and a form that was good for everyone," but said that this is an "important milestone. He said that in the sector "we can not take work because we do not have the people to carry it forward", so it is "important to seek new forms of training. In that sense, he stressed that "sometimes the talent already exists and what we need is to reconvert it". He also considered that "there are many people interested in working in an industry like ours, which today is changing the future. According to him, the chamber made a study in which it detected that "there are many people, in different parts of the country, who finish quite interesting studies and who could well continue or deepen in IT". He also said that they have "found different professions very suitable for, from a training as we are thinking, to be employed by the sector".
For Loureiro, this project, which was initiated by the late former president of Cuti, Álvaro Lame, is strategic, since the fact that the training is entirely online "makes it 100% inclusive", and "gives the opportunity to many people who are in other parts of the country and who do not have access to training of the kind we need".
The engineer also stressed that the proposal is in addition to the existing educational offer, and considered that it is "a complementary activity", since this program is not exclusive with others.
For his part, the director of Inefop, Eduardo Pereyra, said that it is an initiative "discussed with great passion in political terms and with great rigor in technical terms," and that there is "a lot of will to move it forward. He said that Lamé "moved" when he presented "a few years ago" the proposal, and added that it is also an opportunity for Inefop to "validate an area that offers quality work".
Finally, Murro highlighted three objectives of the project: "that it is aimed at people over 18 years of age and without age limit, that there is inclusion of women programmers, and decentralization: that access to people from all over the country is possible".
For those interested, the registration form is now available at http://www.cuti.org.uy/public/common/b-it/.
Source: La Diaria
Connect