SLASSCOM (Sri Lanka Association of Software and Service Companies) organised a two day industrial visit for our undergraduate special degree students. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Jaffna, facilitated this industry awareness visit for the second consecutive year. The students visited IFS, Virtusa, Euro Center, eCollege, Cinergix Research and Sabre Technologies on the 17th and 18th October 2011 during their stay in Colombo.
The main objective of this tour was to provide students with the opportunity to meet IT industry professionals and engage in a knowledge sharing session while getting an orientation to the available career options within the industry. Seventeen students including two senior lecturers were able to witness the working environments of the companies visited. They were also guided in CV reviews, interview preparation, and career selection during the sessions. This initiative comes under the SLASSCOM Capacity Forum with its primary focus on initiatives to expand the Sri Lankan IT and BPO talent pool to be globally competitive.
About the Industrial visit …
“The companies gave us a glimpse of the future of the software industry. This will be really helpful to plan our curriculum to suit the future needs. In addition, they guided and encouraged the students to create an online presence which can be utilized to improve themselves while securing future employment”
— Dr. E.Y.A. Charles, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Jaffna.
“We had informative and productive sessions. Topics covered were current and I’m sure the students would feel the same. The visit gave our students an opportunity to get a clear idea about what the industry expects from them, where they stand and what they need to do to become part of the IT/ BPO industry. Furthermore, we were impressed by the young Chief Technology Officers (CTO’s) who gave good impressions and I think they will be heroes for our students too”.
— Dr. K. Thabotharan, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Jaffna.
One of our students commented, “We received valuable knowledge from the companies visited and this was my first visit to a software company. We were able to get many ideas for our final year projects from these companies. We were informed of the work opportunities available in the IT industry. I’m very happy that we were able to visit some of the leading IT companies here in Sri Lanka”.