Neotel Telecommunications Academy launched

The launch took place yesterday, Tuesday 8 April 2008, at NEMISA headquarters in Parktown, Johannesburg, during which 10 students – four women and six men – graduated and became de facto employees of telecommunications giant Neotel.

“This is a special contribution to the telecommunications industry and to the country as a whole, and we salute Neotel for such a huge and important investment,” NEMISA CEO Peter De Klerk said.

Fully endorsed

The one-year pilot skills programme, as well as the newly-established academy, has been fully endorsed and ‘blessed' by the government training authority ISSET-SETA, whose CEO, Oupa Mopaki, said: “We are proud to be associated with this Neotel project which seeks to deliver a quality programme capable of supporting the skills revolution in SA.”

According to estimates, there are currently about 800 unemployed graduates in the ICT sector – a situation many said cannot continue given the high cost and intellectual efforts involved in studying and training in this sector.

And in a country still battling with high unemployment levels, many observers are now calling for companies to not only provide training opportunities, but also to quantify their needs, by ensuring that successful learners are given full-time jobs at the end of the training programme.

Promote nation-building

Vadi Ismail, chairperson of parliamentary committee on communications, said that events such as these make the country proud in the sense that they provide a neat passage between training and work opportunities and promote nation-building and social development.

One of the graduates, Lufuno Nembudani (21), of Pimville in Soweto, could not contain her excitement of becoming an employee of Neotel. She told Bizcommunity.com: “This is a lifetime opportunity and I thank Neotel for helping me gain such valuable skills and a chance to work for them and becoming a broad-minded person useful to our society.”

Neotel CEO Ajay Pandey said: “Knowledge alone is not enough if it cannot be applied at the workplace. Unless one is employed, his or her knowledge is useless.

“As employers, let's do our bit of efforts to become part of the solution but not part of the problem by addressing issues of shortage skills and unemployment, and hopefully small drops of efforts will as time goes by become as an ocean full of water.”

Neotel is 26% owned by Tata Group of India, 19% by Nexus, 15% by embattled national electricity supplier Eskom, 15% by Transnet, 12,5% by Telkom Namibia and 12.5% by a group of local investors.

Parktown-based NEMISA was officially opened on 26 October 2001 by Minister of Communications Ivy-Matsepe Casaburi. Courses taught at NEMISA include radio and TV production, broadcast engineering and broadcast management, among others.