It is very important to inspire young women to select ICT as their career option and retain the whom who are already in the industry. It has become a major concern the number of female participant in the IT industry and specifically Cisco do consider on networking profession. With the current statistics it is considerably low and this has being directly impacted to the productivity of the organisation around the world due to in parity of the gender.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the IT sector will have nearly 1.4 million job openings by 2020. Yet over two-thirds of these jobs could go unfilled due to the insufficient pool of college graduates with computing-related degrees. Quite simply, if we don’t have enough people with ICT skills to manage and protect the computer systems that power our lives, we are in serious trouble. One third of the unemployment of the world is in Asia Pacific. From that one third as well female percentage is higher than male. Cisco believes as a social responsible company can raise the voice to do a different. To promote Information Technology for Women, CISCO Sri Lanka organized a webinar in February 2015 at the University of Colombo, College House. Ms. Manique Gunaratne was one of the panelists at the programme. She spoke on the “Importance of information technology for women”. The Employers’ Federation of Ceylon I.C.T. Training Centre for Persons with Disabilities conducts CISCO courses on Information Technology Essentials (I.T.E.) and CCNA for vision impaired persons, hearing impaired persons and persons with physical disabilities.
