In an interview with Tert.am, Dr. Hovik Musayelyan, Director of Synopsys Armenia, said that lack of highly skilled personnel remains a major problem of Armenia’s IT sector.
According to different estimates, Armenia’s IT companies need 3,500 to 4,000 engineers.
The reason is that higher schools do not train specialists the private sector needs.
“As soon as higher schools start training such specialists, we’ll say we have not such a problem any longer. The first reason why we have not the required number of engineers is the teaching staff’s professional level. And the second reason is lack of technical equipment,” Mr Musayelyan said.
Armenia’s higher schools do not even have funds for well-equipped laboratories.
Mr Musayelyan points out a need for huge investments – hundreds of millions of US dollars.
“Serious universities worldwide have as big budgets as our state budget.”
As for the accomplishments in 2015, Musayelyan particularly pointed out to two projects: one for secondary schools and the other for universities offering higher educational programs for future IT specialists.
“In the area of general education, an exceptional project was launched in 2015, making microelectronics telecommunication and information technologies compulsory subjects. At the world’s most authoritative Education World Forum, which is to take place in London on January 17, Armenia will introduce that project as an exceptional [initiative], as it is the first ever country to implement it.”
Commenting on the project for higher educational institutions, Musayelyan said that the concept for having a technological university was elaborated at the end of last year. “It is a very ambitious project which will yield its results in the couple of years to come,” he said.
Musayelyan added that he finds educational initiatives of the kind the best possible way to bridge the human resources’ gap on Armenia’s IT labor market. “If our records in late 2016 demonstrate that the vacancies for high-quality specialists have decreased in number, we will be able to state that we have a progress,” he said.
