Practice is the Yardstick

it@ab Training for Young IT Professionals from Southern Africa Provides Applicable Knowledge

2004-07-13. The it@ab information technology (IT) education programmes for young professionals from Southern African countries are far more than academical events. Great store is set by strong practice orientation, and the participants spend much time with hands-on training and internships with companies and institutions in the IT industries. Above all, every attendant has a concrete IT project that they bring from their home country and organisation and elaborate during the programme. Most of these IT projects focus on open source technologies (OSS). Strict practice orientation is the motto that earmarks these capacity building programmes provided by InWEnt in Germany, as the current course strikingly illustrates.

Concrete Projects Need Useful Know-how

Textbook knowledge is not what the participants of the it@ab programmes need. All trainers and IT experts giving lessons in this programme for further education have one important thing in common: they have actually been working in the business and can, from their professional background, teach things that are hardly found in the textbooks.

All participants came with IT projects that they outlined and started in their home countries before the twelve months course in Germany began. As a fully integrated part of the programme, the participants elaborate these projects during their stay in Germany and benefit from the expert assistance and coaching of their instructors.

Mr. Kaijage from Tanzania for example is setting up a “e-shop Platform for Tanzania”. The main category will be the African art crafts. The main market target will be in Europe and America. There will be control on the sellers so as to protect the rights of the buyers. On of the most challenging parts of this project are to find solutions for secure e-payment.

The project scope of Mr. Makoza from Malawi is a total different one. He is working on an extension and optimization to an existing application from a junior consultant of last year’s education programme. The “Commodity Brokery Module” is for trading transportation means, to bring together transportation offer and transportation requester. The idea is targeted to help local farmers and transportation companies and is likely to improve the local business situation. The main objectives of the project are to facilitate access to community, to market, and to transport information to the certain target groups.

Apart from their concrete IT projects the participants are attending classroom training preparing them with the needed knowledge to run successful business oriented IT projects.

Internships start in June and July – International Cooperations

Dealing with best practice studies in class or in computer based training environments is a good thing, but it has to be backed up by real life experience. Consequently, the participants will do internships with IT companies, organizations and university departments all over Germany. “The proof of our new knowledge and skills is in the application, in the real business situation. The Internship offers us the opportunity to combine our gained skills in serving an international market, hence we gain an international exposure in the IT business”, reports Nibampa Simon, an ambitious junior IT consultant. Mr. Simon’s home-organization is an IT consulting company in Tanzania. To deepen his practical knowledge and to get more experience about German IT business Mr. Simon is carrying out his internship at a Freiburg located IT company. His challenging tasks are to reorganize the internal and external server-park of about 30 servers and to migrate different Linux and Unix applications. This expertise will be very helpful for the projects with his clients back in Tanzania.

The internships are the first opportunity to demonstrate and test the recently acquired skills in a true working environment.

Contact:
InWEnt gGmbH / Cologne
Frau Renate Finke
renate.finke@inwent.org

Contact:
21 LearnLine AG / Freiburg
Herr Rainer K. Kasemir
rainer.kasemir@21LL.com