Academia must synergize with industry to close skill gap — IT Experts
By Emmanuel Elebeke
Stakeholders in the Information and Technology industry have called for closer collaboration between the academia and the industry as 93 percent gap exists in Nigeria’s IT sector and can only be bridged when the academia transfers requisite knowledge to the industry.
They made the call at the International Conference on Information Technology Education and Development (ITED 2018), titled: Information Technology for Promotion of Quality Education, Research and Local Content Development held in Abuja.
Delivering the keynote, Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, Dr. Ibrahim Isa Pantami, said retooling the content of Nigeria’s education curriculum has become inevitable. “For this reason NITDA is interested in fostering viable and sustainable education technology system, learning and teaching using technological tools.”
The DG, who was represented by a director in the agency, Dr. Ben Ewa, noted that what Nigeria needs to do is employ a process that would fill up the deficiency in the supply side to get it right in the education system.
‘‘With the increasing wave of innovation, the supply side of technology should be prioritized to enables education, including content. We don’t have enough digital content in the curriculum, and as such need a curriculum that is interactive. For us in NITDA, we would, in five months, come up with a workable framework that will be used to develop the new curriculum and mechanisms for delivering digital content to different end users.
‘‘The most effective way is for the private sector to support government to fund research in the development of such initiatives that can be provided through shared infrastructure in order to make IT affordable to end users.’’
Speaking for the Academia in Information Technology Profession, AITP, the organizers of the conference, National President, Prof Afolanyan Obiyini, stated that the conference was organized by to draw attention to the compelling need for synergy between the academia and industry operators for greater productivity.
“Information technology is ruling the world now and Nigeria as a nation cannot afford to lag behind, hence the need to seek ways of closing the gap between the academia and the industry. There are inadequate teaching research facilities and unemployable students that are produced in all our tertiary institutions. We want to bridge the gap between teaching and research in the country. We want to liaise with government to fund research that can devise local means to motivate lecturers to produce research,’’ he added.
In his remarks, President of Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria, CPRCN, Prof. Charles Uwadia, said the academia are producing graduates who are not grounded in IT because they are not abreast with latest technological skills. “The academia must be properly schooled to be abreast of the profession and apply technology in teaching the undergraduates; else it would result to producing graduates without requisite skills in IT and thereafter become unemployable.
“We need to ensure that standards set are adhered to and also bridge the existing gap. That’s why we also do accreditation. Technology keeps on changing, so we need continuous upgrade of the curriculum every two years and build capacity of those who will implement the curriculum through collaboration,’’ Uwadia said.
President of Young Innovators of Nigeria, YIN, Mr. Abu Andrew said YIN is proposing partnership with AITP to find a sustainable solution to drastically reduce unemployment in the country. “As part of efforts by YIN to achieve the objectives, the organization had started a skill-gap analysis and commenced training of young Nigerians within the university and out of school youths in Bayelsa, Yola, Kebbi states in the areas of user support, telecom, cyber security, infrastructure business development and maintenance, with an annual target of 5000 from 2018 to 2020 across the six geo-political zones.
‘‘We proposed a partnership with AITP to synergise our relationship with all stakeholders in the ICT industry and academia because we young people find ourselves in an environment where we go to school and believe that we can work after school. We want to change that mentality. The industry needs to go back to the universities to mentor the young people in the university and also participate in training young lecturersm,” Andrew said.
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