Opportunities in ICT education

While cost saving is at the forefront of the reasons for offshoring to low wage countries, the moves relevant to ICT are also motivated by difficulty in finding the right talents inside the country. One of the root causes for such a difficulty, is related to the drastic fall in the number of students in field like computer engineering and ICT. To combat that, there have been serious changes in national education policies, and the way universities and other training institutions conduct their business to inspire young students to choose ICT for their studies. Although as a consequence of those, in some parts of the world, the number of students enrolling in these fields have stabilized or even increased, given the number of years it takes to educate a graduate, the number of graduates has been dropping at alarming rates. Furthermore, the ICT skills shortages for experienced professionals, in most industrialized countries can be expected to get worse, before they eventually get better. There is also a strong case for retraining many people who already have tertiary education, whether in the workforce or not, to overcome to ominous ICT skills dilemma. This paper reports on the examination of these problems. It also reports on the advantages of taking a more broad-spectrum view, requiring a combination of many existing solutions along with novel approaches and realistic analysis of the acceptance of the current global ICT services and education environments to overcome these problems.