China Launches New Project to Train Advanced Software Engineers

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, December 18, 2001

China Launches New Project to Train Advanced Software Engineers

A new training project for software engineering newly launched

A new project, known as "Software Engineering Training" launched by the Executive IT Institute (EIT) and jointly established by Ambow Corporation and the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA), began operating Monday in Beijing.

The project is claimed to be the first of its kind in China, because it is co-sponsored by the China-based university, BUAA and international software giants, including Microsoft, Bea and Sun.

It was designed to attract institute and university graduates with majors in software engineering and preferably with relevant work experience.

Sources from the Institute say that the project will offer up-to-date and advanced courses to students and will invite senior software designers and engineers from Microsoft, Bea, Sun and other software companies in Silicon Valley to teach students.

The project expected to solve the problem of shortage of skilled professionals

At a press conference held Monday, Wei Yu, vice-minister of Education said that the software industry is a key measure for the development of a country's information industry. However, China does not do well in this field. The main problem is that China is very short of skilled software professionals.

Statistics show that China's annual demand for software professionals is up to 200,000, while every year, only 40,000 software engineering students graduate from colleges and universities. The supply is far beyond the demand.

In addition, some long-standing problems such as out-of-date knowledge and a serious lack of well qualified teachers still exist in the teaching of software engineering.

Lastly Wei hopes that the newly launched project will help solve the problem of the industry's shortage of skilled professionals.

Chinese software engineers

China has about 400,000 people working in different rungs of the software industry overall, but few are high-level software engineers.

"Most (of the Chinese) are programmers. Very few people are program analysts and system designers," said a report by the Asian Technology Information Program, a nonprofit organization in Tokyo that conducts IT-related research. "Thus, professionals with system integration skills, especially for large-scale integration, are not widely available."

But this is expected to change soon.

The ATIP said that the total number of software professionals in China will increase by 20,000 every year. A Chinese diplomat in India believed that the number of highly skilled professionals will double in the next five years.

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