The minister of education, power and industry, government of Delhi, Narender Nath, inaugurated the Oracle Education Career Program last week at the Informatics `Centre of Excellence' in South Delhi. Informatics is one of Asia's leading players in the field of computer education and training, with over 226 specialised training centres in 26 countries. It has been operating in India through a joint venture company, Edutech Informatics India Pvt. Ltd, since August 1998.

Edutech Informatics (India) Pvt. Ltd, a part of the transnational Informatics Group, headquartered in Singapore, has recently appointed Oracle Software India Ltd as its education partner in India. The Oracle Education Career Program (OECP) will now be available at Informatics' newly launched Centre of Excellence at Delhi, apart from the company's Centres of Excellence at Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai. OECP is a comprehensive suite of products and services that helps participants meet variousindustry requirements as well as pursue a career in Oracle technology. The curriculum and course material have been designed by Oracle Corporation and is used worldwide. It covers a wide range of modules ranging from introduction to IT to advanced Oracle tools along with a 12-day project to reinforce classroom learning.

OECP is a 45-day, six-hour-a-day programme and provides the flexibility of a part-time option as well. On successful completion and subsequent certification administered by Sylvan Prometric, the participant can embark upon a career in software development.

Incentives restored

Along with the Thai economy, the daily newspaper business is also improving. Several publishers have restored incentives for staff who were stripped of fringe benefits or had their pay cut in the past two years, writes The Bangkok Post.

While most newspapers laid off employees to save money during the recession, some are now recruiting again and have announced plans to pay a bonus this year.

A majorThai-language publisher, the Matichon group, will pay a mid-year bonus of 45 days' salary to each of its 1,400 employees. Employees of the Daily News, the second-largest Thai-language newspaper, will increase welfare payments for its staff, as sales revenue is edging up.

Tech crisis

There is a deceptive simplicity about the shortage of information technology workers in the Washington area, a shortage that seems to be creating great opportunities for some workers and painful frustrations for others, according to The Washington Post. The issue looks simple enough. Companies are begging for more tech workers, particularly software programmers. In response, a growing tide of adults of all ages and varied backgrounds are signing up for technology courses in hopes of launching lucrative new careers. But the opportunities have proved deceptive for a considerable number of these would-be-technology workers who don't find the jobs they expected

What's needed is more caution, according to the authors of anew study of information technology workers backed by the National Science Foundation. Workers who decide on technical training need to carefully choose the courses and schools they pick in order to increase their chances of getting the jobs they want, according to the study authors Peter Freeman and William Aspray.

And companies need to take more risks with promising but unconventional job applicants, such as the English majors and welfare recipients who have gone back to school to learn technology skills, they advise. Freeman is dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Aspray, executive director of the Computer Research Association (CRA) in Washington, which published the study, The Supply of Technology Workers in the United States.

See http:// www.cra.org/wits/cra.wits.html