Huawei is in the preliminary stages of talks with universities around Australia to arrange joint training programs that could eventually see a flood of networking engineers delivered into a telecommunications sector made needy by the National Broadband Network.
It is understood that thousands of students could eventually go through the programs. Huawei is growing fast in Australia and will soak up some of the talent, but others could find spots at other networking vendors or even at high-profile telcos such as NBN Co itself.
The effort represent the latest move by a large technology firm to address the perception that university graduates leave the institutions with a strong theoretical background but not enough real-world training for the workforce.
At this stage Huawei is believed to be in discussions for teachers and lecturers to come from Huawei University in Shenzhen in China to Australia to become educators for the new programs.
The University of Melbourne-based Institute of Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) is one of the universities involved in the early talks and may become the main education centre for Huawei in Australia.
The telecommunications giant already has a partnership with IBES by providing hardware to conduct research and development that Huawei hopes will assist in the National Broadband Network development process.
Huawei announced last week that it would create 200 hundred new local jobs in the next few years — in areas ranging from administration to accounts, construction and engineering.
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