October: Institute set to put Egypt on IT global map
Egypt, Business, 7/30/2002

Established in 1993 to bridge the technological gap between Egypt and the developed nations, the ITI has had resounding success, with 14 percent of its graduates working with the world's most famous IT and software companies.

Mohammed Salem, chief of the ITI, which is supervised by Cabinet Information and Decision-Making Support Centre, said the increases teaching staff and students are other indicators of the institute's success.

"When the institute was founded, its main target was to bridge the gap between market demand and the capabilities of Egyptian educational institutions. "Most Egyptian universities and colleges were too far out-of-date to train their students on the state of-the-art IT," he said.

"We started with only four demonstrators. Now we have 50 with some 300 experts work as visiting professors," Salem said in an interview with the Arabic weekly magazine October.

"The number of graduates jumped from 50 to up to 2000. We are a non-profit organization and quality is our main concern," he said.

Salem added that the ITI administration focused on the international market from the very beginning.

"Fourteen percent of our graduates work in Europe and the United States. Ahmed Khalifa, who graduated in the first batch, is now working with Oracle.

Abdel Qader Ahmed Bahgat, a graduate of the second batch, has contributed to the development of the Arabic-enabled version of the Windows 2000 operating system," Salem said proudly.

He said that the ITI has managed to attain international fame. When a famous British software company decided to establish a factory in Egypt, it selected four-fifths of its manpower from the ITI graduates.

Discipline, Salem said, was the secret of success. "We are state-run but we adopt a strictly disciplined approach in all our activities. In addition, we apply accurate assessment, follow-up and examination programmes for our students," Salem said.

He added that the ITI gives top priority to the training of the students and to supplying them with all necessary equipment. "We focus on the practical aspects of the IT, like the application of information technology on the different aspects of life. We offer our students air-conditioned classrooms a computer terminal, an Internet line and a printer. Students are also given LE 300 per month," he said.

Salem noted that the ITI has signed cooperation agreements with six international universities.

In March 1996, the JAVA programming language was introduced in the world. Only one month later, we to started teaching it to our students," he said.

"There is fierce competition among our teachers to get acquainted with the latest IT developments. We practically transform our training programme every three months to cope with these developments," he said. "We do not teach our students fixed subjects.

We rather seek to train them on how to absorb all new developments in their field," he said.

Salem said that due to military-style discipline, the ITI has become the best in the region.

"No country in the Middle East, not even Israel with its alleged technological supremacy, has a similar institute. We can even match the standards of IT institutes in the United States and Canada," he said. He said that the ITI was a government investment for the long run.

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