The Estonian IT Academy is the umbrella name given to a joint initiative aimed at elevating Estonia’s higher education in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) to a new level so that it would be capable of an international breakthrough. This entails world-class higher ICT education, which would: When pursuing the objective, Estonia will benefit from its international reputation as a successful IT country capable of implementing and developing new information and communication technologies. This is a foundation which makes it significantly easier to resume building up reliability as a significant provider of higher ICT education. This initiative stemmed from the conclusions of the Estonian Development Fund’s EST_IT@2018 foresight project. ICT implementation has contributed to almost 50% of the productivity growth witnessed by the Western economies. Estonia possesses sufficient untapped potential for benefiting even more from ICT. Regrettably, the shortage of thousands of ICT specialists does not enable to utilise the ICT potential in Estonia. Therefore, ICT companies find it impossible to expand their business activities in Estonia. The current economic crisis and an overall increase in unemployment have not brought any relief: according to employment agencies, there is a persistently high demand for ICT specialists and every tenth available job is being offered namely to computer specialists. Problems are deepening in the medium-long term: the supply of highly qualified IT specialists will decrease further in the coming years due to unfavourable demographic trends persisting in Estonia. In 2014, the number of high school graduates will plummet by nearly a half from the current 12,000. The ensuing relevance to higher ICT education would be a decline to just five hundred students enrolled in computer sciences programmes compared to the one thousand students currently commencing their studies in this area. Should the efficiency of the education process remain unchanged, the number of ICT graduates would drop from some 350 today to just 190 a year. Considering the deepening shortage of ICT specialists, the common goal of the signatories is to make sure that – regardless of the unfavourable demographics – the number of students commencing studies in the field of ICT in Estonia would remain AT LEAST at the current level and that most of the students would complete their studies on schedule. |
A possible solution is to become significantly more active in bringing foreign students and lecturers to Estonia. In order to achieve that, needless duplication in Estonia's higher ICT education must be avoided and all efforts should be pooled towards co-operation outside Estonia. A purposeful engagement of foreign students from target countries relevant to us will also underpin the efforts of Estonian companies seeking to operate in these markets and increase their export revenues. Within the framework of the co-operation agreement, we have decided to prepare a business plan by spring 2010 at the latest. We will try out different possibilities, agree on necessary steps and then mobilise resources into carrying out the vision. We hope that the experience drawn from this pilot project will be of use in a broader context and contribute to finding effective and fast ways of making Estonia's higher education international. We are inviting all interested parties to contribute to the success of the Estonian IT Academy! The memorandum has been signed digitally by: Taavi Kotka from the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Peep Sürje from Tallinn University of Technology, Alar Karis from University of Tartu, Rein Raud from Tallinn University, Kalle Tammemäe from the Estonian Information Technology College, Ott Pärna from the Estonian Development Fund.
Background slides by Ott Pärna on the cooperation agreement as the basis for the Estonian IT academy (pdf 2 mb) Read also the: |
