The Maltese Government has just launched a literacy campaign on the back of some hard numerical evidence that we need to be doing much better in this area. Not that we needed the data! In business circles we have been feeling this lack of literacy for years now, in particular the poor level of English. Over the last years, as a governor on the e-skills alliance board, I have been present at a number of meetings and workshops on ICT training and education, and invariably one of the points which is always made, irrespective of the audience, is that we need to improve our levels of English.

So it is all good news to see such an important initiative taking shape. A look at the success achieved in the UK in the early Blair years on this front indicates that a lot can be achieved in quite a short time, if this issue were tackled in the proper manner.

Another area which needs similar attention is the area of ICT. The industry has for the last years, through the e-skills alliance, been making representations to the effect that if we want to continue to grow as a major knowledge economy in the region, then we are going to need many more ICT graduates than we have today.

The industry needs to grow in two directions. The first is ICT servicing, which will continue to make sure that all the pillars of the economy, as well as Government, are being well serviced from a telecommunications, infrastructure and application point of view. Higher levels of competence will be required in an environment where more businesses will be outsourcing their ICT operations, and a higher level of service needs to also be developed. The second area is software development, an area which allows local as well as foreign investors and entrepreneurs the ability to develop products and to deploy them globally. The added value to the economy from this activity could really be very big.

In an exercise completed a couple of years ago in consultation with the major industry players, we completed a profile of the “ideal ICT graduate”. The main outcome was that we need generalist first degree students split at the highest level into infrastructure engineering and software development degrees, with some basic foundation topics in all courses, to produce students capable of growing into specialisations later. This will need to be supplemented by post-graduate specialisation courses. We then went on to complete a gap analysis with the Faculty of ICT, to map these requirements against existing courses. The outcome was very positive, with fresh degree courses being announced last October in line with industry requirements and recommendations.

The second area which was identified for action was vocational training in ICT. It is clear that we need a very focused set of vocational courses, where candidates who do not have the natural aptitude to go up the quite demanding ICT graduate ladder can still participate actively in the industry, by focusing on a very specific subject and being an expert in a particular, narrower field. As an example, one can look at areas such as database administrators, HTML developers, as well as industry-driven certifications managed by global technology leaders such as CISCO, Oracle and Microsoft. Unfortunately, Mcast is not filling this gap well and more work needs to be done to channel Mcast’s effort in this direction, rather than trying to build a second university.

The third, and perhaps most important area to tackle, is primary and secondary education. Unless we offer students who have an aptitude for ICT the opportunity to find this out at a very early age, we will never have the funnel of students we need. At an early age we need to expose students to fundamentals of logic and programming, to make this career path available to these young kids, as we do with all other aspects of education, from art to mathematics, from sports to geography. Otherwise we continue to not only make the vision of becoming a leading knowledge economy impossible to reach, but perhaps more importantly, we will be doing a big disservice to our kids.

A focused review of all curricula at all levels needs to be undertaken to ensure that we have a good level of ICT subjects to achieve this important objective. Unfortunately, a lot of students and their parents think that completing ECDL certification will get them there. ECDL is about using desktop productivity applications and not about ICT competence. To use the analogy of the car, ECDL gives you a driving licence but will get you nowhere near being a mechanic.

Over the last years, a lot has been achieved in getting Malta up the ICT readiness scale in all aspects. However, if we want to continue to take a lead, we need to invest in the educational system to be able to generate the quantity of ICT professionals we require, without at any stage compromising on their quality. We need to do this in a well-structured manner, but we need to also do it fast. Otherwise we will be losing a whole generation.

Mr Fearne is the managing director at ICT Solutions, a local ICT systems integrator company.