"The international experience is that a failure rate of investment projects in new industries in a competitive market is very high," stated the July 2006 report. "The statistics seem to suggest that you should not be looking for success rates of greater than 10 per cent. With the decline in garments and other areas of manufacturing, new areas of growth have to be found and internationally ICT is one such area," the report added.

absorbed into the workforce

According to the study, over 10,000 persons receiving information communication technology (ICT) training at various levels, most of whom have already been absorbed into the workforce. The report also observed that the INTEC project had served to sensitise the country to the importance of ICT in enhancing international competitiveness.

This has resulted in Jamaica being far more technologically aware than formerly and being in a position to attract significant investment and generate better paying jobs outside of only call centre type operations, to include increasingly, more lucrative back office operations for international companies and software development.

Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell, who received much flack when some of the call centres financed by INTEC went belly up, notes that in order to increase the number of jobs in this segment of the market the Government would continue to invest in its human resource capacity to attract inward investment and provide Jamaicans with the skills and impetus to compete in high end segments of the ICT industry such as software development.

initiatives

"To this end the Government has focused on developing the requisite skills through initiatives such as the Caribbean Institute of Technology (CIT) established in 1999 which trains graduates in the concepts and skills required for a career in software development, turning out over 500 software developers to date," says Paulwell. In addition he pointed to the CISCO Regional Academy, established in 2002 which offers an associate programme, all designed to create a capacity of technicians who can design, build and maintain computer networks,"

Similarly, Patrick Casserly, whose e-Services is widely regarded as the leading outsourcing firm in the English-speaking Caribbean having won major contracts to supply a number of Fortune 500 companies, concurs that the massive training efforts initiated by the ministry and led by agencies such as the HEART/NTA had contributed to "building a critical mass of human capital" which is essential in such a knowledge-based industry.

Although his company has its own training programme for its 2,700 workforce, the bulk of which are based locally, Casserly acknowledges that the availability of trained or trainable workers, combined with Jamaica's proximity to the North American market, well developed telecommunications infrastructure and liberalized telecoms sector, cost efficient and high quality English-speaking workforce,placed the country in a very favourable position to attract ICT business and investments.

"A number of the top firms overseas are valuing near-shore as opposed to merely offshore locations for their processing," said Casserly who notes that increasingly clients require their customer service representatives to possess both superior communication skills and the ability to resolve complex customer issues.

His observations support the findings of a 2003 Deloitte and Touche study which notes that competitive pressures are encouraging financial institutions to send work overseas with one-third of the world's major financial institutions already utilizing offshore outsourcing, with 75 per cent indicating that they would shortly do so.

Another study by management consulting firm AT Kearney and cited in the ministry's report, states that US financial services firms were planning to relocate more than 500,000 jobs overseas, representing more than eight per cent of their workforce over the next five years and worth potentially US$365 billion as forecasted by Deloitte.

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