Sunday, January 20, 2008

IBM and St.Xaviers College

IBM and St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which enables the Kolkata based premier educational institution to conduct IBM India’s Accelerated Career Excellence (ACE) programme recently.



IBM India’s ACE programme is aimed to groom technical talent at workplace. This unique programme provides the non-engineering employees of IBM India with an opportunity to upgrade their skills and qualification by doing a 4-year MS programme in Software Engineering. To facilitate this higher education program, IBM signed an MoU with the University of Mysore in 2006 to develop a 4-year MS programme for its employees with BSc degree. The curriculum of this course has been designed and developed jointly by the University of Mysore and IBM.



As per the MoU, IBM would use St Xavier’s expertise to run this programme for its Kolkata-based employees. IBM will bear the execution fees for this programme that includes venue, faculty, infrastructure, examinations, internal assessments, stationary, and library usage.



Speaking about the MoU, Amitabh Ray, Vice President, Global Delivery – Consulting and Application Services, IBM India, said “IBM strives to ensure that its employees have access to the best learning and training opportunities to help provide career growth opportunities and job rotation possibilities within IBM. This programme will play a significant role in helping us tap a fresh talent pool while simultaneously helping IBMers enhance their qualifications in the engineering sector. This MoU with St. Xavier’s couldn’t have come at a better time as it enables IBMers to be a step ahead in the technology ready workforce.”



Post their degree, IBM’s Kolkata employees would have increased opportunities to be placed at different IBM locations in India, be deployed on different technologies and across business domains.



Rev Fr. P.C. Mathew, S.J., Principal and Secretary of St. Xavier’s said, "This MoU will enable a long term partnership between an industry leader like IBM and St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, a premier centre-of-excellence. This programme is testimony to what public-private partnerships between academia and industry can achieve in enabling joint curriculum design, research and teach and train the students on market strategic technologies to support India's burgeoning need for IT ready professionals.”



IBM has been one of most aggressive recruiters in the Indian marketplace. From 38,500 employees in December 2005, IBM augmented its workforce to 53,000 as of December 2006. Kolkata houses IBM's second largest pool of employees after Bangalore.

IBM has over 355,000 employees working across the globe and is an equal opportunity employer. IBM provides its employees with broad career growth opportunities with a wide spectrum of jobs, flexible working options, and continuous training and professional development. Being part of a globally integrated enterprise, professionals working at IBM in India get to work with some of the best minds across IBM and the industry globally. IBM Global Campus, that is the largest online university of its kind, offers more than 20,000 learning modules including 3,500 e-learning and classroom courses plus books and other resources.

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