So I attended the Cisco South Africa Career Day 2008 and it was well worth going. The event was hosted by Cisco in conjunction with the Cisco Networking Academy and the University of Pretoria.
A way that I have used to gauge the importance of an event has been to look at the “headline” act. In todays case the introduction was done my General Manager of Cisco Systems, Mr Steve Midgley and the key note address was given by Deputy Minister of Education Mr Enver Surty.
The drill-down of the presentations was that there is a skills shortage and there are initiatives already happening and in the pipelines to help address this global problem.
The event took place at the the University of Pretoria in the Entertainment Hall and Lecture Room 100 and centred around the development and availability of skill in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Sector mainly locally but also touched on it globally (China and India).
The event was held at the University of Pretoria to provide Cisco Networking Academy graduates the opportunity to get some “face time” with Cisco channel partners. The event provided the Cisco partners an opportunity to meet the future talent and interview graduates face-to-face. This exposed Cisco Networking Academy graduates to openings within Partner organisations, while allowing Partners to asses prospective employees.
From Cisco systems there was a clear message that they were going to be actively involved in developing and building the skills needed to assist partners and in turn the local economy through various initiatives. They drove this message home by making this the “public” launch of the Cisco Talent Partner Portal that I posted about here 2 weeks ago.
I stole a few business cards myself and talked to some of the bigger partners, one never knows when that might come in handy.
Related: http://it-online.co.za/content/view/353879/97/
Kudos again to JP for organizing the invite.