Gearing the workforce to bridge the IT skills gap
Mr. Zafarullah Hashim
Sri Lanka needs to shift its public and private service towards the increased use of new technology in daily work backed by the proper training to create a skilled workforce.
In this respect, Trainocate, a people-development company, is currently working with a number of private companies to train their staff and prepare them for their job roles and hope to engage with the government sector as well in future, the company’s CEO for Emerging Markets, Middle East, Zafarullah Hashim said.
The company that entered the Sri Lankan market last July is already the market leader as Asia’s largest tech and human capability development trainer. Earlier in July 2021they became the first Asian company to be Microsoft’s #1 Training Partner Worldwide.
Their business operation is carried out between business to business, business to government and business to customers as well.
Mr. Hashim said that they were involved in helping the youth and organisational staff to be ready for jobs or work on the technology existing in the organisation more efficiently.
He noted that they will come up with school level programmes, an educational system catered towards enhancing skills in coding, graphic designing, IOT and game development.
As a 26 year-old company that rebranded itself from Global Knowledge, Trainocate is headquartered in Singapore with a presence in 14 countries.
Operations in Sri Lanka commenced in July, after Mr. Hashim, rejoined the industry after a 6-year break. “The training industry was stagnant, people development was not prioritised, and available technology was underutilised.”
He pointed out that in this respect there was an increased need to focus on training as most were not adequately trained to take on the tasks ahead of them.
Trainocate has trained over 2400 persons in a total of 164 companies during the last financial year. The training was mainly on the Microsoft, Azure, Data Engineer, Artificial Intelligence, Power BI, Power Apps, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365.
Role-based training has created an opportunity for everyone to grasp knowledge and is a passport for career development. The certifications conducted by Trainocate are all authorised vendor certifications from Microsoft, AWS, Google, Cisco, and VMware that are globally accepted industry level certifications.
The CEO also said that though the technical staff was aware of the technology available in the organisation and focused on technical capability, to the contrary the end users are at times oblivious and were lagging behind in completing their day-to-day tasks with optimum efficiency. With this in mind, Trainocate has come up with its own Learning Management System (LMS) called Remote End-User Self Enablement Training (RESET). It’s a platform that has a wide range of content on Microsoft 365 collaboration and productivity working tools.
The trainers at Trainocate are international trainers from Singapore, Malaysia, India, Australia and a few from the European countries.
Mr. Hashim pointed out that their intention was to work with the government and achieve a target of training around 10,000 individuals by the end of 2023 in bridging the gap between the ICT education and ICT industry.
At present, Trainocate has already sent in their proposals to the Government and was seeking an appointment in this respect.
Trainocate Lanka manages South East Asia and the new markets that include Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei, Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar.