Program to encourage students to take up STEM-related careers to bridge skills gap; Plans to reach out to 1,000 students in greater Toronto area in first year
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the leading IT services, consulting, and business solutions organization, today, announced the expansion of its goIT initiative into Canada.
goIT is a key TCS initiative to get high school students interested in pursuing higher education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Over the past 12 months, TCS has been working with Canada’s Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) to develop an innovative program to spark interest among Canada’s grade 7-10 students to pursue careers in the STEM fields.
The program will be initially rolled out to 10 schools within the Greater Toronto area starting in the 2013-14 school year, with the intent to expand to more school boards and regions across Canada. It will be led by TCS professionals and involve multiple in-school workshops throughout the entire school season on some of the latest technology topics. In the first year, the program will target over 1,000 students.
“Building on a long history of working with Canadian universities, TCS is delighted to introduce its goIT program, which is designed specifically for students at the stage that they most likely start making career choices,” said Loucas Saites, TCS Canada’s Marketing Head & local goIT Program Owner. “Canada needs to attract more students into ICT and we are proud to partner with ICTC to further this cause.”
In 2009, TCS launched the goIT program within the US to address the issue of decreasing university enrolment in careers related to STEM. The TCS Canada goIT program is designed to encourage students to take up ICT as a career choice to solve the long term skills shortage in the country.
“Preparing the workforce of the future will be critical to our economy and who better to bring on board than our youth, we’re thrilled to see TCS’ leadership in this arena striving to be part of the solution,” said Namir Anani, President and CEO, ICTC. “This program brings emerging technologies into the classroom and gives students direct interaction with some of today’s leading experts. It has all the right ingredients to help enable and nurture tomorrow’s talent.”
