Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) in association with JICA Bangladesh office organized a certificate awarding ceremony for the first batch of trainees of the “Bangladesh-Japan ICT Engineers’ Training Program (B-JET)” on Sunday (Mar 4), at the BCC auditorium, ICT Tower. State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak, MP grace the ceremony as the chief guest and while Ambassador of Japan in Bangladesh Hiroyasu Izumi was the special guest. JICA Chief Representative Takatoshi Nishikata and Executive Director of BCC were also present on the occasion, said a press release.
Palak in his speech congratulated the trainees and deeply encouraged the IT engineers and companies to take this as a great opportunity to increase export market of Bangladesh. He told that Bangladesh started enjoying a huge demographic dividend where more than 65 per cent of population are of working age.
“Interestingly Japan is the third most attractive IT market in the world, next to America and Europe. The government envisioned to build Digital Bangladesh by 2021 and set a target for 2 million employments in IT/ITES sector and 5 billion USD exports from IT/ITES sector. We are eager to provide the trained IT engineers to Japanese market in a appropriate manner.”
Palak also said, competitive wages, low energy prices and cheap production cost resulted Bangladesh the top investment destination for Japanese companies, according to the last several survey conducted by the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO).
“The survey was conducted on more than 20 countries in Asia and Oceania, which found Bangladesh as the most lucrative investment destination both in manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. So, I solicit personal cooperation to the ambassador of Japan in Bangladesh, His Excellency, Mr. Hiroyasu Izumi and Chief Representative of (JICA), Mr. Takatoshi Nishikata to increase the investment of Japan in the ICT sector of Bangladesh.”
“Currently, we have initiated the second phase of ITEE project where we intend to address the issue of shortage of IT skilled manpower in Japan IT market. The project is targeted to help us develop IT manpower in such a way so that it fulfills the requirement of Japan market and also the requirement of Bangladesh. I believe that the trained manpower under this project will act as a Bangladeshi envoy to Japan”, said Hiroyasu Izumi, ambassador of Japan in Bangladesh.
Chief representative of JICA, Takatoshi Nishikata said that Japan will face huge crisis for IT engineers in the upcoming days. So, we are collaborating the BCC to trained the talented Bangladeshi youth as they can cope up with the Japanese market. I hope the the participants of B-JET will lead the IT sector of Japan in near future.
Japan is an important export destination for Bangladesh for the IT and ITES sector. Government of Bangladesh is taking a number of initiatives to increase the IT export market. There is a growing trend of increasing demand among the Japanese companies for IT human resources and IT related services. The access to the Japanese market heavily depends on Japanese language and understanding of business culture and high quality services.
B-JET is a three year long pilot training program under the JICA assisted project “The Project for Skills Development of IT Engineers Targeting Japanese Market” with BCC. Through B-JET program, each year around 120 IT engineers will be given training on Japanese language, Japanese business manner and ITEE (IT Engineer Examination) related subjects to provide them the opportunity to work with Japanese companies.
Each course is three-month long, and the first batch of 20 trainees who selected through rigorous procedure completed the program, secured placement in Japanese companies in Japan. The second batch of 40 selected trainees will start training in March. These trained engineers will be a good source of human resource for the Japanese as well as Bangladeshi companies who want to expand business relationship with Japan.
