Through its partnerships with the Malta Government, the University of Malta and private companies, Microsoft is aiming to drive economic growth and employment, the company's vice president for central and eastern Europe, Vahe Torossian, said.
Addressing a group of top executives from private and government entities at the Radisson SAS Bay Point Hotel in St Julians on Tuesday, Mr Torossian said the island contributes to his region's growth and optimism, making it the fastest growing region in the world for Microsoft.
He outlined ways in which Microsoft is helping to advance the ICT programme in Malta together with the public and private sectors.
"Through our close partnership with the government and working hand in hand with small and medium businesses, we see the opportunity to fuel the creation of new services and products for the benefit of growth in Malta."
Microsoft Malta has undertaken a number of ongoing investments in support of drivers of economic opportunity and social inclusion such as in the spheres of innovation, education and job creation. Its partnerships aim to address the basic IT skills challenge and the shortage of professionals.
"Innovative and demanding businesses look for future employees to be as 'business ready' as possible when they leave school," Mr Torossian said.
He added that as an industry leader, the company has a role to play to help create an innovative business environment. It developed a variety of programmes to provide tools and technologies to innovators with one goal in mind: to broaden their access to technology and build the local skills capacity to better empower its local partner ecosystem.
Microsoft education programmes, such as the Microsoft IT Academy at the University of Malta, which is in the process of being established, focus both on the supply and demand sides of the skills and jobs generation.
Microsoft promotes infrastructure building to stimulate jobs and business opportunities by enabling people to be more employable thanks to recognised IT skills knowledge. By encouraging bigger investments in life-long learning and in tools to overcome the shortage of IT professionals in Malta, Microsoft Malta helps increase local growth and reduces unemployment.
Mr Torossian said that one encouraging example of this is the recently-launched Smart Women programme, designed to help women join the ICT industry. This training course builds the student's skills from basic IT to developer, administrator or business worker level.
"The speed of growth is calling on us to engage with all players of national competitiveness and bring together what it takes to create long-term sustainable and economic development because our communities need to get the basic skills to be competitive, because our partners need the ability to create and to develop new ideas and solutions and because young talents need a framework to convert their knowledge and creativity into sustainable business models," Mr Torossian said.