On Talent
Egypt has an abundant and sustainable pool of talented, technologically skilled, and multilingual university graduates. A government funded university intervention program in Cairo is dedicated to getting students ready for employment each year and through the EduEgypt initiative – a collaboration between the Ministry of Communications and Technology and the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research – Egypt is able to equip undergraduates with soft skills, language abilities and technical competences that will secure Egypt’s future workforce. Also, with an annual graduate talent pool of around 330,000 students, Egypt is now globally associated with learning, dialogue and tolerance (UNESCO, 2007).
Egypt’s dense population produces an attractive labor supply, where English is fluently spoken by university graduates and where proficiency in many other European languages is high. Secondary school enrolment is historically high, and the corresponding output will feed university systems in the future, ensuring a constant flow of capable and ambitious employees. Among the graduating labor pool, 100,000 students will have chosen commerce, science or engineering degrees, which are highly desirable disciplines, producing excellent candidates for jobs in the ICT and engineering sectors in Egypt and worldwide. Additionally, Egypt ranks in the top 10 for its IT skills in emerging markets (A.T. Kearney).
As a result of its professional pool of graduates, Egypt has become one the world’s most attractive and fast growing locations for global outsourcing. The country has 20 technical institutes with 17,000 engineering graduates entering the marketplace each year; added to which are leading institutes such as Al-Azhar University, Cairo University and Ain Shams University. The Egyptian Education Initiative was set up to improve “employability” in Egypt, and is supported by leading multinational companies such as CISCO, HP, IBM and Intel. The majority of training costs are covered as part of a wider government program, supported by the Ministry of Communications and Technology (link to MCIT website), to develop its skilled workforce– creating one of the best IT industry enabling environments in the world.