Carmel Cachia likes nothing better than to see a waiter come over to take his order in a restaurant armed with a tablet. It’s nothing to do with the food but rather the fact that it is all about applying digital skills.

Since April last year, he has been the executive coordinator of the eSkills Malta Foundation, leaving a long career in the private sector to help improve the digital agenda in Malta.

He found an established framework. The foundation was set up in 2014 and took over from the Malta Information Technology Agency (Mita)’s eSkills Malta Alliance. The foundation gave the former alliance an added layer of independence but still kept the crucial input of the private sector, ending up with a structure that, he said, was the envy of many its counterparts in other member states.

For example, its board members are representatives of Mita, the Malta Communications Authority, the Malta Gaming Authority, Malta Enterprise, the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry and the Education Ministry. That bridges a considerable amount of the gaps between demand and supply, and also allows the foundation’s team of two with its annual budget of just €250,000 to punch well above its weight.

The foundation taps into other multipliers too, such as student ambassadors and careers advisers, and social media, to reach as many beneficiaries as possible.

An entire wall of his office at Gattard House is dominated by a huge whiteboard with dozens of projects listed, each with progress bars across the time axis. He leafs through a notebook with pages and pages of topics to tackle during the interview, packed with key messages that he wants to get across.

One important one is that the name ‘eSkills’ is perhaps a misnomer now, given the way that technology is developing.

“There are many stakeholders who believe that it should be called the ‘digital skills’ foundation,” he said. This is because the remit is not only about ICT capacity building but also about using digital skills in other industries.

“We want to create e-leaders, not necessarily people from ICT – but rather those who can introduce digital technology into companies. Take blockchain,” he said. “Someone needs to propose the idea of introducing within his or her company, someone who can explain how it would benefit the company.”

Blockchain, the latest buzz word, seems set to be as disruptive a technology as the internet – and will similarly have an impact on many sectors. Mr Cachia had a word of caution, however: “In my opinion, we need to be careful. We could be the pioneers as Malta is very fast where technology is concerned. But we need to see how it pans out globally. The concept seems quite simple but there are many developments, each with their own implications – such as the legal aspects – and it is not always wise to be the innovator.

“The Internet of Things will also change very rapidly. It is already being called the ‘internet of everything’,” he quipped. “Everything needs to be designed with IOT in mind, from devices to gadgets.”

The vision would be useless unless Malta were able to match the people to the vacancies and the foundation is also working on bridging the gap between the educational side and industry.

Google has pledged to train millions of people and there are now digital workshops available for various subjects, e.g. for marketing. The foundation is trying to engage with them to launch it officially

“This is a big issue, not just in Malta, as education needs to be synchronised with industry. So we have been looking at the various curriculums, talking to industry and proposing changes. However, it takes years for changes to the curriculum to actually get to the classroom so maybe things should have started earlier…” he said.

“I also believe that we need to start at primary schools, not only in what we teach but in how we teach it. All school project assignments should be multimedia, to open up children’s skills. And, of course, this should be backed up at home, even though some families tend to be quite conservative.”

It is important to know where the country stands now, especially given the rapid changes to the economic sectors over the last decade. However, it is not only new sectors like i-gaming that need ICT input: in fact, the foundation carried out a study last summer on the ICT skills needed in the industrial sector, analysing the needs of some 30 companies.

To keep the study as independent as possible, it was carried out in collaboration with an Irish entity, FIT, which also provided resources. Although the formal results are not yet out, Mr Cachia said that there were no surprises in the preliminary findings.

“Locals are becoming specialists but industry prefers those with broader skills, which most foreigners have,” he said.

The results, which will soon be published, should make interesting reading for stakeholders, as there are already about 600 vacancies on the island, corroborating the findings of other studies.

He said that contrary to perception, many of the vacancies are for associate level technicians and not graduates.

“Of course, we still need experts but we also need many people who can translate their visions into reality. Developers do not need to have degrees. They could be Microsoft certified,” he said.

This led him to another important point: the importance of industry certification: “There are so many courses and they do not have to by vendor-specific like Microsoft and Cisco. There are so many topics that need to be covered,” he said, referring back to his point about having broader skills, “such as cybersecurity, systems analysis, digital infrastructure and data analysis.”

Some of these courses give certification all the way up to degree level, although he cautioned those interested to do their research on the quality of the provider.

“Google has pledged to train millions of people and there are now digital workshops available for various subjects, e.g. for marketing. The foundation is trying to engage with them to launch it officially. It would be a chance to train the labour market as the courses are basic level so no prior knowledge is needed,” he said, also referring to other opportunities like the so-called Massive Open Online Courses available.

There is, of course, no shortage of foreign experts willing to come here, and he said the foundation had seen an increase in workers from both the EU and outside it, with “a shift in the number of British wanting to come here because of Brexit”.

The trick, he said, would be to balance making it easier for vacancies to be filled by qualified people and ensuring that Maltese who studied IT found jobs themselves. The key, he said, was to push for more mentoring by the imported experts, a subject that the foundation plans to take up more formally with industry in the coming months.

Mr Cachia talks about other projects planned for this year, highlighting the works to be done under Malta’s presidency of the EU – which he “was honoured” to present to the Commission on Malta’s behalf.

“We are doing studies, making recommendations, following up the action points. There are far too many studies that end up on a shelf gathering dust.”

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