Chennai: Networking major Cisco Systems Inc plans to train about 1,00,000 students through the Cisco Networking Academy Program that focuses on teaching students how to design, build and maintain computer networks, said Mr Marcus Lim, manager programs, Asia Pacific, in a meeting with press persons. It also aims to bridge the gap between the demand and supply of information technology professionals.As a part of this initiative, Cisco plans to establish 34 Cisco Regional Networking Academies in India in partnership with the Indian government and educational institutions. These academies will be provided with receive networking equipment to build leading-edge network labs as well as comprehensive training in the Networking Academy curriculum and technical support systems.
Also, the regional academies are expected to recruit and support 10 local academies to broaden the availability of the program even further. The academies will be supported by a Cisco Academy Training Centre .
This structure allows the program to be scaled up rapidly and also provides the ability to ensure quality across the academies, Mr Lim said. Also he added that this framework creates the "Strongest vehicle to change the way people learn."
The programmes are based on open source standards with about 30 per cent based of the course based on Cisco framework as the labs are from equipment supplied by Cisco at cost to the Local Academies. In order to broaden the offering, the Academy has entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems and will offer training in Unix.
Currently, there are about 6,221 academies in 110 countries and about 1,80,035 have enrolled in the programme.
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