Chinese firms invest to fill UK skills gap

Employers training up next generation of staff

When Viktor Linde moved to London from the German town of Duisburg in 2013 at the age of 14, he spoke only basic English, and struggled with life in an unfamiliar country.

After finishing high school, instead of going to university he opted for a local vocational training school, as fees are cheaper and the academic environment is less competitive. Then things changed.

Shortly after he began studying at Barking and Dagenham College in East London, the college partnered with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to launch a pioneering IT training course.

Huawei offered students some of its cutting-edge IT sector insights and allowed them to practice classroom activities on its latest equipment, worth tens of thousands of pounds and unaffordable to most schools.

“I truly enjoy classes. Learning about the latest industry hot topics and using such high-tech equipment makes me excited about working in the real world,” said Linde, now a confident young man aspiring to become a network engineer.

The class Linde and his classmates took is offered by the Huawei Authorized Information and Network Academy, or HAINA, a non-profit project the company developed to help educate the next generation of IT talents. Globally, more than 16,200 students from more than 240 partnering colleges and universities have received this training.

The UK has more than 10 HAINA partner universities and colleges. Students take modules such as networking technologies, security, cloud computing, IT storage systems, and big data. Each module demands weeks of theory and practical training. Because of this, the HAINA certificate is a trump card for young graduates looking for their first job in IT sector.

Now HAINA and Barking and Dagenham College are taking their partnership one step further. The college recently made an application to the Department for Education to become one of the UK’s new Institutes of Technology, with Huawei as one of its two anchoring industry partners.