GCTU partners telecommunications industry to groom graduates

The Ghana Communications Technology University (GCTU) has entered a number of partnership deals with the industrial sector to help groom students of the university and help churn out industry-ready graduates with technical abilities and hands-on knowledge.

Since last year, a number of technology-related companies in the country have signed on to the training partnership with the university, including Hubtel, Jospong ICT Group and Huawei Technologies Ghana.

As part of the partnership, the companies would take on a number of GCTU students for industrial attachment which would be assessed by both lecturers from the university and supervisors from the companies.

It is expected that the training would propel the student to acquire the relevant skills needed to fit into the job market when they graduate.

The agreement with Jospong ICT Group would also see the establishment of a world-class cybersecurity training centre on the university’s premises, involving the construction of a €400,000 facility to help train students in cybersecurity and ICT solutions.

Re-engineering

In furtherance to the university’s ambition to produce graduates with industrial knowledge and skills, it is focusing on re-engineering some of its courses that would help transform the mode of training of the country’s manpower needs especially in technology and its related industries.

As a result, four satellite campuses of the University — Ho,Takoradi, Koforidua and Kumasi — are being converted into centres for the training of young graduates to produce basic ICT equipment.

These centres would serve as an extension of the classroom while providing a working environment for the graduates to practically impact the society with the skills and knowledge acquired while studying at the university.

Digitisation

The Vice-Chancellor of the university, Professor Emmanuel Ohene Afoakwa, said in line with the government’s commitment to transform the country through digitisation and focus on industrialisation to scale growth, the university had been positioned to provide the needed training of the human resources that would steer the development of the agenda.

He said the vision of the government and the university council was to nurture personal values and ethics that would become the standards for the development of graduates that would guard the country’s long-term dream of becoming an ICT hub in the sub region.

“As our partnerships continue to grow stronger every day, we shall ensure the provision of quality education for our students and enhanced professional development for our staff,” he said.

As a pioneer in the delivery of Transnational Education (TNE) in West Africa, he said, GCTU would continue to bear the torch as one of the most successful TNE providers in Africa to ensure that Ghanaians got access to world-class tertiary education without leaving the shores of the country. He explained that over the years, GCTU had established, built and maintained successful academic partnerships with several universities abroad, including Coventry University, UK, Aalborg University, Denmark, Anhalt University, Germany, CASS Europe, France and Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, India.

Govt support

In January this year, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo pledged support to transform the university into a world-class centre for training the country’s manpower in ICT.
President Akufo-Addo said the university’s ambition of becoming Ghana’s Silicon Valley to train young graduates in Robotics, Artificial intelligence and other related ICT fields was extremely significant because the acquisition of such knowledge and expertise had become the norm for survival of any country in the 21st Century.

“It’s the new language, it’s the new knowledge, it’s the new sciences which we would survive in the 21st Century.