CAIRO - Within the framework of plans and programmes set by the Egyptian Government for the coming period, the Egyptian Minister of Communications and Information Technology (ICT); Mohamed Salem recently announced the launch of an integrated training programme to increase efficiency and productivity. The training programme comes out of the belief in the role of ICT tools in contributing to increase efficiency, productivity and supporting community participation, advancing the economy and production in all sectors of the State. Organised in collaboration with the Ministry of State for Administrative Development, the programme enables young employees working in the governmental bodies to use ICT tools. The programme is designed to refine the technical skills related to information technology amongst young employees in all the State sectors. This programme comes as one of the serious steps to increase competitiveness among the government bodies in upgrading the employees' performance and increasing productivity through IT training programmes and capacity-building, so that the user can achieve maximum benefit by having access to Internet and ICT tools for young employees in the above mentioned bodies. It is based on a number of themes, which are enabling the youth of using IT tools through training on the latest technologies in their respective fields. The programme also aims to support young employees at their work places with personal computers to do their jobs effectively using ICT tools and cloud computing model. Moreover, this is to be accompanied with providing the required software to increase productivity, and hence, improve the performance. At the end, a study shall be undertaken to observe the impact of the programme on the productivity through the measurement of specific indicators to benefit from its results in future programmes. The new programme shall be applied in the ministries according to a strict schedule through phases so as to accommodate the numbers of trainees, in order to maintain the aimed quality of the training process. The programme includes a number of 100 trainees of each ministry under the age of 35, according to the specified programme conditions along with the job description of each trainee in order to determine the appropriate package of programmes. As for the conditions, the candidates of each ministry will be directed to the MCIT Program Management. Upon this, a schedule will be established and the MCIT affiliate: the Information Technology Institute (ITI) shall supervise the programme implementation. Moreover, trainees from each participating ministry will comply with a detailed plan for the programme, whereas the programme implementation that will last for six months. The first batch of candidates from the specified ministries was received as of 20/8/2011 until 30/8/2011. The training programme of following batch shall be announced on September 11 given that the first batch should start on September 18. The Programme Management shall identify a number of indicators to be measured, in addition to performing a questionnaire to the trainees measuring the programme's impact and usefulness, in order to determine the feasibility of the programme repetition and expansion in the coming years.
