Bangladesh to take the advantage to provide IT Engineers to Japanese maket: Palak

DHAKA, March 4 (NsNewsWire) — Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) in association with JICA Bangladesh Office
organized a certificate awarding ceremony for the 1 st Batch of trainees of the “Bangladesh-
Japan ICT Engineers’ Training Program (B-JET)” on March4, 2018 at the BCC
Auditorium, ICT Tower. State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak, MP grace the
ceremony as the Chief Guest and while Ambassador of Japan in Bangladesh Hiroyasu
Izumi was the Special Guest. JICA Chief Representative Takatoshi Nishikata and
Executive Director of BCC were also present on the occasion.
Honorable State Minister for ICT, Zunaid Ahmed Palak in his speech congratulated the
trainees and deeply encouraged the IT Engineers and companies to take this as a great
opportunity to increase export market of Bangladesh.He told that Bangladesh started
enjoying a huge demographic dividend where more than 65 per cent of population are of
working age. On the other hand, Japan, the third largest economy of the world, is
experiencing a shrinking manpower. Interestingly Japan is the third most attractive IT
market in the world, next to America and Europe. Our Government envisioned to build
Digital Bangladesh by 2021 and set a target for 2 million employments in IT/ITES sector
and 5 billion USD exports from IT/ITES sector. We are eager to take the advantage by
providing the trained IT Engineers to Japanese market in a appropriate manner.
Bangladesh will take the opportunity to fill this gap with the skillful IT engineers for
building Digital Bangladesh.
Palak also said , competitive wages, low energy prices and cheap production cost resulted
Bangladesh the top investment destination for Japanese companies, according to the last
several survey conducted by The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO).
The conducted the survey on more than 20 countries in Asia and Oceania, which found
Bangladesh as the most lucrative investment destination both in manufacturing and non-
manufacturing sectors. So, I solicit personal cooperation to the ambassador of Japan in
Bangladesh, His Excellency, Mr. Hiroyasu Izumi and Chief Representative of (JICA), Mr.
Takatoshi Nishikata to increase the investment of Japan in the ICT sector of Bangladesh.
Currently, we have initiated the 2nd phase of ITEE project where we intend to address the
issue of shortage of IT skilled manpower in Japan IT market. The project is targeted to help us develop IT manpower in such a way so that it fulfills the requirement of Japan
market and also the requirement of Bangladesh. I believe that the trained manpower under
this project will act as a Bangladeshi Envoy to Japan, said Hiroyasu Izumi, ambassador of
Japan in Bangladesh.
Chief representative of JICA, Takatoshi Nishikata said that Japan will face huge crisis for
IT Engineers in the upcoming days. So, we are collaborating the BCC to trained the
talented Bangladeshi youth as they can cope up with the Japanese market. I hope the the
participants of B-JET will lead the IT sector of Japan in near future.
It's mentionable that Japan is an important export destination for Bangladesh for the IT
and ITES sector. Government of Bangladesh is taking a number of initiatives to increase
the IT export market. There is a growing trend of increasing demand among the Japanese
companies for IT human resources and IT related services. The access to the Japanese
market heavily depends on Japanese language and understanding of business culture and
high quality services. B-JET is a 3 year long pilot training program under the JICA
assisted project “The Project for Skills Development of IT Engineers Targeting Japanese
Market” with BCC. Through B-JET program, each year around 120 IT Engineers will be
given training on Japanese Language, Japanese Business Manner and ITEE (IT Engineer
Examination) related subjects to provide them the opportunity to work with Japanese
companies. Each course is 3 month long and the 1st batch of 20 trainees who were
selected through rigorous procedure completed the program and secured placement in
Japanese companies in Japan. The second batch of 40 selected trainees will start their
training in March. These trained engineers will be a good source of human resource for the
Japanese as well as Bangladeshi companies who want to expand business relationship with
Japan. Press Release