Sean Nero

Mi­crosoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melin­da have been in­vit­ed to vis­it T&T.The in­vi­ta­tion was ex­tend­ed by Fazal Karim, Min­is­ter of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing fol­low­ing the sign­ing of a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing be­tween Mi­crosoft T&T and gov­ern­ment for the youth in ed­u­ca­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship project YouthSpark. The sign­ing took place at the tech­nol­o­gy gi­ant's new lo­cal head­quar­ters at Mu­cu­rapo Road, St James, on Wednes­day evening.Karim said a vis­it by Gates will make a sig­nif­i­cant state­ment to the tech­nol­o­gy world, not on­ly in terms of the Mi­crosoft's cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, but about part­ner­ing with a de­vel­op­ing coun­try like T&T in re­search.

"I al­so think there are op­por­tu­ni­ties with Mi­crosoft and our ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions for in­tern­ships and the ex­change of fac­ul­ty and the place­ment of fac­ul­ty at our in­sti­tu­tions. It is my de­sire and my in­ten­tion, as we build the ca­pac­i­ty of our young peo­ple, to move our so­ci­ety from a re­sume dri­ven so­ci­ety to a so­ci­ety in which we cre­ate jobs," the min­is­ter said."We can­not stay de­pen­dent on sim­ply send­ing re­sumes and ex­pect­ing that we are go­ing to get jobs. In fact, I want to tell you (that) in terms of the Mi­crosoft acad­e­mies that we have around the coun­try–and we would have spo­ken in terms of the con­cept of en­tre­pre­neur­ship which is now be­ing brand­ed as tech­no-pre­neur­ship in the world of tech­nol­o­gy–that we have to be cau­tious against sat­u­rat­ing the mar­ket with what I call the grad­u­ate glut.

Karim added: "The grad­u­ate glut is sim­ply, in terms of the what the labour mar­ket says, if we do not fo­cus on where the jobs are, what you are go­ing to be do­ing is not on­ly cre­at­ing the grad­u­ate glut and over sat­u­rat­ing the mar­ket, but you are go­ing to cre­ate dis­cour­aged grad­u­ates, many of whom up­on com­plet­ing a course of study fi­nanced by you the tax­pay­ers find it ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to find a job."He said the ma­jor ob­jec­tive of pur­su­ing ed­u­ca­tion is for em­ploy­ment and it was for that rea­son that his min­istry's work force as­sess­ment cen­tres had a pro­gramme called Not in Ed­u­ca­tion, Em­ploy­ment and Train­ing (NEET).

"Tal­en­tism for me is the new cap­i­tal­ism. You just need to look and see what is hap­pen­ing across the world. In fact, it is my view as well that while we fo­cus on mar­ket, what we need to fo­cus on as well is minds. While we fo­cus on growth and we call that easy growth, we should al­so fo­cus on smart growth," he said.The YouthSpark pro­gramme serves as a spring­board, not just for em­ploy­ment, but to de­vel­op en­tre­pre­neur­ship in the dig­i­tal age. Mi­crosoft YouthSpark is glob­al com­pa­ny that is ex­pect­ed to cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties for 300 mil­lion young peo­ple world­wide over the next three years. Un­der the agree­ment with T&T, Mi­crosoft will pro­vide ac­cess to soft­ware so­lu­tions at State-op­er­at­ed aca­d­e­m­ic in­sti­tu­tions, as well as train­ing for ed­u­ca­tors and stu­dents in the use of so­lu­tions.

As part of the deal, the com­pa­ny will in­clude and pro­vide sup­port for oth­er de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes such as DreamSpark, BizS­park and Imag­ine Cup, which help young stu­dents and po­ten­tial busi­ness cre­ators gain ac­cess to tech­nol­o­gy to start a busi­ness with the aim of solv­ing glob­al chal­lenges.Hern�n Rinc�n, pres­i­dent of Mi­crosoft Latin Amer­i­ca, said the com­pa­ny works with more than 400 part­ners. "For every dol­lar that Mi­crosoft sells, those part­ners re­ceive $21 of ac­tiv­i­ty around our soft­ware and that type of sys­tem has an im­pact here on the is­land. In our cit­i­zen­ship ac­tiv­i­ties, we have in­vest­ed more than US$20 mil­lion in the last ten years in T&T. "We have trained al­most 80,000 stu­dents in the use of tech­nol­o­gy. We have done about 13,000 dif­fer­ent cours­es here in T&T for those stu­dents. We have fund­ed eleven new en­tre­pre­neur­ial ac­tiv­i­ty, com­pa­nies that use our soft­ware for free so that they can grow and flour­ish. So those are three ex­am­ples of things that we have done here in T&T that go sig­nif­i­cant­ly be­yond what we do as a busi­ness," he said