Within the framework of the visit of a Uruguayan delegation to the United States, UTU agreed with Cisco to start introducing courses provided by the Networking Academy next year. Teams of Cisco professionals will come between November and December of this year to train teachers in the use of the platform, as well as to check knowledge of the initial courses, the Minister of Industry, Carolina Cosse, told Radio Sarandí.
Networking Academy is an educational institution founded on an online platform and owned by Cisco. "This course could allow thousands of young people to finish high school and find a vocation, which also means jobs," she said.
Through these courses, young people will be able to access "very quickly" jobs "with salaries that are truly above average", he said. This agreement "has an educational impact" and also "in the aspirational change of people, in giving them a tool so that they can get a job and from Uruguay to the world", he added. These courses are aimed especially at students of the six technological poles of UTU and also at the five dedicated to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
For his part, the president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (CUTI), Leonardo Loureiro - who is also part of the delegation - told El Observador that in relation to the knowledge that both countries possess "there are no differences" and that the most important thing about the visit is the building of relations, of agreements, in order to be able to take Uruguayan companies to Silicon Valley.
For Loureiro, it is important for public and private companies to know how the entire US technology ecosystem works and what is being done, what it is being used for and what the benefit is. "Public entities in Uruguay demand a lot of technology and private companies want to be the ones providing those technologies. If the two sides know how to merge, new and sophisticated things can be generated that will later make a mark on the country," he explained. "The first and most important thing is that when we come here we are building a country brand," he stressed.
Visit
The minister visited Google's offices in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday. There she met with company managers to explore new investment opportunities in ICT. The minister stated that "there is already a wealth of experience and a structure of trust built up" thanks to the submarine cable project, as reported in a MIEM communiqué. She added that work will continue to consider other projects and that serious interest was aroused in Uruguay.
Cosse also visited Stanford University accompanied by the national delegation. Together with education authorities, including Anep president Wilson Netto, CETP-UTU board member Miguel Venturiello, and representatives of the University of the Republic (Udelar), they exchanged on science and technology programmes with the aim of incorporating some models and adapting them to the country's teaching curriculum.
She highlighted Stanford's emphasis on fostering teamwork from an interdisciplinary approach: "Radical collaboration promotes that mistakes in educational or research processes do not limit students".
Loureiro said they also visited Puente Labs, "an organisation that is looking for bridges between Latin America and Silicon Valley". "They made some proposals for us to analyse, both to industry and to the government," he added. They put forward "a proposal for collaboration", to be able to take more Uruguayan companies to Silicon Valley and begin to generate knowledge of the region, he said.
The delegation also visited Apple and Facebook. The two Silicon Valley tech giants also aroused interest in the country.
Source: The Observer
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