ICT - Noor Soormally : “The ICT sector still needs to address the issue of skill development”

Noor Soormally, from Whitefield Business School, states that in the last budget, the Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth spoke about how to move towards Vision 2030. “The three year strategic plan (2017 – 2020) explains how Mauritius needs to delve into new sectors of activity (e.g. ocean economy, high-tech manufacturing) or further develop its existing activities (e.g. exporting our ICT products to Africa, entering new markets for our tourism industry, finding ways to have food security) in order to achieve the country’s higher aims.”

He avers that with this strategic plan, the ICT sector, which is the 3rd pillar of the Mauritian economy, needs to address a major issue which is skills development. “Young graduates coming out of local government-funded universities are found to lack many skills and this has been the case for a number of years now. That is why the government has put up a scheme known as the NSDP under the aegis of the Human Resource Development Council. This particular scheme should be used to teach young graduates the required skills so that they meet the standards for employment hence filling up the major skill shortage issue.”

Till date, as observed by him, skills inadequacy is still a major problem that industries are facing and big multinational companies have to train new recruits before they can start working on projects. “With this great dearth of talent and experience, our country is still competing at the level of service providers, that is, call centres and not solution providers i.e. high-tech software developers. As for connectivity, we are now able to provide faster internet access than before but if you compare internet connectivity with Europe or India, we are very much behind.”