By Steven Yi, President, Huawei Middle East and Central Asia
Digital talent drives digital transformation and unleashes productivity in the intelligent era. Powered by 5G advanced connectivity, big data, computing power and AI, technological advances have made our lives easier, more responsive, and more autonomous. But a biting global ICT talent shortage said to affect 87% of all businesses, underlines the pressing need to accelerate ICT talent cultivation to bridge the digital divide created by the fast adoption of 4IR technologies.
While the Middle East and Central Asia (ME&CA) region closely follows the global digitization track, it is better positioned than its global peers to bridge the ICT skills gap. According to IDC, ICT spending across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) will top $233.8 billion this year, an increase of 3.9% over 2022. The Central Asia region, on the other hand, has accelerated its initiatives to strengthen ICT infrastructure, digital literacy, and technological competitiveness.
These digital trends in the ME&CA countries provide a ripe ground to develop a rich talent pool that can easily be upskilled to support national digital goals, deploy advanced technologies, bring new social and business value to all industries, and build a sustainable digital economy.
The first step in building a sustainable ICT skills pipeline is forging broad partnerships with governments, academia and businesses. Such partnerships address the disconnect inherent in traditional university education that still somehow has a major percentage of its system relying on theories and concepts rather than practices and capabilities that can match the accelerated digitalization journey.
At Huawei, we have always advocated for an open, shared ICT talent ecosystem that benefits all parties, and we have initiated many initiatives and programs to support this direction. In 2013, we launched the now highly successful ICT Academy, a school-enterprise cooperation project involving higher education institutions to help foster a talent ecosystem. Throughout, we have established talent alliances, contributed to talent standards, improved talent capabilities, and communicated the value of talent to strengthen digital skills throughout society.
As of June 2023, 230 Huawei ICT academies have been established in ME&CA, while over 46,000 trainees have passed Huawei exams. Globally, Huawei ICT Academies are operational at more than 2,200 universities worldwide, training more than 200,000 students annually as of 2022. Furthermore, the Huawei ICT Competition provides an international platform through which university students worldwide can compete and share ideas.
Meanwhile, our flagship CSR initiative, Seeds for the Future, is Huawei’s longest-running flagship CSR program. Since 2008, the program has supported local ICT talent development by enhancing international knowledge transfer amongst students, promoting a greater understanding of and interest in the technology field, and encouraging participation in the region’s growing digital economy. More than 4,000 students from the Middle East have participated in Seeds for the Future since its launch and have gone on to pursue successful careers in ICT and made a vital contribution to their national social and economic progress.
We recently kicked off the 2023 edition of the program, which will be held completely offline and we are building a cross-cultural communication platform to enrich the summer holiday experience of outstanding youths, enhance their interest in ICT knowledge, and work to broadening their technical knowledge and skills. The 2023 edition of the Seeds for the Future program will include the first regional largest two-station creative challenge that will take place in Qatar and the UAE.
Our talent development program continues to evolve. We recently launched the Instructor Enablement Camp, the first initiative to be rolled out under the Huawei Academy Instructor Enablement (AIE) program, providing access to resources, activities, and engagements to support Academic Instructors to prepare, enable and upskill their capability to become well-cultivated ICT talents, positively impacting students’ success. More than 220 instructors will take part in the first phase of this program.
We continue to be keen to contributing to the real-world industry challenges for multiple competitions hosted by academic organizations like IEEE and CAAI to inspire and engage the next generation of STEM talent. To further inspire universities to be the center of innovation and progress, we offer an online experiment simulation services across 22 ICT technical domains, serving 81 universities worldwide by the end of 2022 through the “Talent Practice Platform.”
Recognizing that every business today is a technology company, ICT training should go beyond IT personnel and embrace business and department heads. Further, empowering the partner and customer ecosystem with advanced skills ensures better service delivery for end users and mutual customers.
We leverage years of ICT technical expertise and management practices to provide training services to customers across industries, helping them improve managers’ understanding of transformation and cultivate employees’ digital skills. In 2022, Huawei nurtured nearly 160,000 ICT professionals worldwide, with more than 100,000 participants receiving Huawei’s ICT certification. We continuously optimize our certification system, which covers career and specialist certifications. By the end of 2022, Huawei presented over 750,000 certifications worldwide.
Green and low-carbon development is today a global imperative. ME&CA governments have prioritized sustainable development, with green agendas embedded in many national visions. The UAE Environmental Policy seeks to increase the clean energy contribution in the country’s energy mix to 50% by 2050. Meanwhile, the Saudi Green Initiative aims to increase domestic generation capacity from green energy to 50% by 2030, in line with Vision 2030.
ICT can help accelerate these goals, leveraging the synergies between digital technologies and sustainability. A World Economic Forum survey found that 40% of business leaders believe digital technologies are already positively impacting their sustainability goals.
Guided by the “Tech for a Better Planet” initiative, Huawei focuses on energy conservation, emissions reduction, renewable energy promotion, and contributing to a circular economy. By incorporating eco-friendly and energy-efficient ICT infrastructure, we also champion a sustainable digital economy, leveraging digital solutions to reduce global carbon emissions by 20% by 2030.
There’s also broad recognition that women and girls pursuing tech face unique challenges, with Deloitte estimating that by 2022, large worldwide tech enterprises had a female presence of about 33%.
Huawei promotes Gender Equality and Cultivating Female Leadership in the tech industry. We launched the Women in Technology initiative in 2020, through which we have initiated several projects in about 33 countries. With a philosophy of “Tech for Her, Tech by Her, Tech with Her”, the initiative leverages Huawei’s technologies and platforms to improve women’s well-being, help more women enter the tech industry, and cultivate female leadership.
Strengthening collaboration with academic associations as part of a diversified, multi-path effort to explore industry challenges and cultivate STEM talent is a global priority. Open partnerships and collaboration for shared success are pivotal to achieving talent cultivation targets that will promote social and economic progress, new values and breakthroughs in the ME&CA region in response to the accelerated digital world demands and opportunities, given the region’s immense potential through its rich talent pool, a key pillar for building the sustainable digital economy and achieving the national plans and visions.
