Cisco Will Certify 360,000 New Network Engineers in India

Cisco has released a plan to boost the Indian number of networking engineers from about 60,000 as available today to 360,000 within five years. The new engineers will be trained by Cisco and certified on Cisco networking gear and technologies. There have been rumors recently that alleged that Cisco is having financial difficulties and ceased any employments.

According to Cisco representatives, the company has already established the necessary partnerships and will soon open new testing facilities for the new engineers. The company has also certified two of India's largest technical organizations, IIHT (Indian Institute of Hardware Technology) and NIIT (National Institute of Information Technology), to train staff on Cisco technologies. The two organizations have already started training in more than 200 locations in India.

"The launch of our talent-development initiative in India underscores Cisco's commitment to expand access to the IT training and certification resources that will support the country's continued economic growth. With these initiatives in place, we are able to ensure that our customers and partners have the resources available to train and equip the thousands of motivated students in India with the knowledge and skills necessary to shape the country's burgeoning information economy."

Pearson VUE is another important Cisco partner in India and the company promises to add another 150 testing facilities for Cisco certification until 2009. Rural areas will have several mobile centers to cross the villages in search for country-side engineers.

"With these initiatives in place, we are able to ensure that our customers and partners have the resources available to train and equip the thousands of motivated students in India with the knowledge and skills necessary to shape the country's burgeoning information economy," said Leo Scrivner, VP of human resources for Cisco Services & Globalisation Centre East, in a prepared statement.

Cisco also invested more than $1.1 billion in a new research and development facility built in Bangalore last October.