YIPS (Young i Professionals), a youth forum linked to COMMON, will be launching on 10 November, at the IBM Auditorium, in Sandton. COMMON is the world's largest independent community of IBM i and Power System users.
YIPS is a youth-centred group and also has close ties with IBM's Power Systems Academic Initiative Program, which has set its sights on the skills shortage burdening South Africa's IT industry. “In order to develop skills on a local level, IBM invested heavily into their skills programme, the Power Systems Academic Initiative Program.
The programme aims to serve the skilled resource needs of mid-range server and large enterprise server clients,” says Cally Beck, Power Systems Academic Initiative Programme Manager, Northeast British Indian Ocean Territory and Central Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa.
“Previously, there was very little done from a skills development perspective, particularly with youth who had academic potential, but no ability to improve on their technical/practical expertise. As a result, the major problem facing the local IBM community was a shortage of RPG programmers. Many businesses battled to find personnel that were skilled at a reasonable cost to company,” says Marinus van Sandwyk, Founder and CTO of Tembo Technology Lab.
IBM started the South African programme in 2008 as part of the drive to boost skills within the industry. “The situation in South Africa regarding the lack of available IT skills, in particular programming and development for our clients and partners, was at the critical stage. We knew that we had to act fast to turn this situation around to protect our loyal customer base and increase our customer satisfaction levels.
“By November of the same year, we had produced our first group of trained IBM i students over a period of four months. We achieved because of the excellent collaboration with the Vaal University of Technology (VUT) and are currently in our third four-month term at the university.
“Some of the best performing students have all gone onto achieve their first paid job, using the skills they've learned through the course at VUT. It's motivating to see everything coming together for the benefit of all involved. The results speak for themselves and the programme will grow further because we will be adding more universities to our programme portfolio throughout 2010,” says Beck.
“YIPS provides an ideal back-up for the graduates of the Power Systems Academic Initiative Program because as part of COMMON, YIPS is able to allow young IT professionals to glean off the experience of independent IBM users who are not only in IT, but other vertical industries as well.
“Thus far, 50 RPG programmers have walked through IBM's academic initiative at VUT, all of whom will greatly replenish the IT industry and in turn be supported by YIPS and the COMMON community, which offers free membership and is a section 21 company,” says Van Sandwyk.
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