Address

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Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am privileged to be here this afternoon to address you on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union on the subject of re-training and retaining Asia’s native talents.

I am particularly honored to speak to this august gathering in Beijing, at a momentous time, as the globalization trends seem to be unstoppable.

To attract, train and retain the brightest and best is one of the monumental challenges in Asia. Some of the member economies present here have major programmes to conserve their homegrown technical talent for instance, by funding for schools and colleges, research grants and tax breaks, while others make efforts to attract skilled and creative workers into their country.

Industry can sell you the best hardware and the best software in the world, but new technology for technology’s sake is not enough. The gap is in "brain ware": more skilled workers and more diverse skills. This certainly applies to the overall telecommunication sector in order to face the convergence of technologies and the revision of the notion of services.

At the same time, the focus is moving from engineering to operations, business, services and markets. This will mean an enormous retraining effort to upgrade workers with new and updated skills.

The purpose of the International Telecommunications Union is in keeping with facilitating peaceful relations, international cooperation among peoples and economic and social development by means of efficient telecommunication services.

The ITU is the unique international organization where all telecommunication and broadcasting issues are discussed and where, among others, Administrations, Regulators, Operators, Industries and Research Centers, from allover the world, meet together to building the harmonized development of telecommunications worldwide. In other words, The International Telecommunication Union is the specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for the regulation, standardization and development of telecommunications worldwide, including international management of the radio frequency spectrum and satellite orbits.

The ITU is also the oldest International Organization which, tomorrow, will celebrate its 136th anniversary. During its long history, the ITU had to face a number of changes mainly due to technological trends and it was very successful in adapting itself to the needs of its members.

Nowadays the ITU must get over another critical step to comply with its membership requirements, should they be Administrations or from the private sector, as well as to keep being the international focal point in all telecommunication matters. In this respect, as you may already know, the ITU has initiated a very important reform process to review its management, functioning, structure and financial foundations and the rights and obligations of its members.

Also, under the auspices of the Secretary general of the Unites Nations, the ITU has been designated as the leading organization to organize the World Summit on Information Society which will be held in 2003. The private sector will have a substantial role and presence in the Summit. IT vendors and service providers, as well as ITU users and non-governmental organizations, will be invited to participate in its preparation.

For more than 35 years, the ITU also promotes the mobilization of human resources through a number of appropriate projects and activities including human resources development ones. For instance, the ITU was the pioneer among UN agencies in course development and designed the model which is now used by other UN agencies.

The ITU has the specific mandate from its membership to assist developing countries in building institutional and organizational capacity through human resources management and development activities. Besides its traditional activities directed to promote training and development actions in the telecommunications and management fields, the ITU is increasingly focusing on promoting the extensive use of information and communications technologies for distance-learning activities in developing countries.

Face-to-face learning has been our mainstay, but more and more, our training is delivered over the web. An important part of our offering is training the trainers. We prepare tutors to develop courses to be delivered online. The ITU also recognizes that with new modes of delivery, new paradigms of learning are emerging. So, at the receiving end also, those being trained have to deal with change management and attitude change. There is also an emphasis on lifelong learning in fact, employee skills need to be constantly upgraded.

Since It would take a significant time to enumerate all these activities, I would like to underline the most relevant projects that the ITU is carrying out, through its Telecommunication Development Bureau.

The following are the most relevant dedicated projects that the ITU is undertaking in order to help countries enhance their training and development capability, including the production and delivery of high-level programs that must be appropriate not only in terms of their timing and delivery mechanisms, but also – and most importantly – in terms of their subject specificity and telecommunication field orientation:

• The ITU is presently carrying out 5 Centers of Excellence; 2 in Africa, 1 in America, 1 in Asia-Pacific and 1 in the Arab region. The purpose of these centers is to create regional networks of training and education-related institutions that would partner with other telecommunication-related organizations so as to combine resources aimed at strengthening the capacity of a given region to develop know-how and expertise to meet the training needs of the telecommunication sector.
• The Global Telecommunication Training Institute and the Global Telecommunication University are two ITU projects consisting in establishing a global network by pooling available resources from the existing training centers around the world that are interested in delivering telecommunication training at a distance, the first addressing technicians and supervisors from telecommunication organizations in technical and managerial aspects, the second dedicated to telecommunication technology, management techniques and regulatory aspects for Graduate and post-graduate levels.
• The International Telecommunication Union, through a partnership approach with private sector global players, is running an Internet Training Centers initiative which aims at assisting developing countries to meet their human resource requirements for skilled Internet and "new economy" professionals. About 50 Internet Training Centers shall be developed in this respect.
• Finally, I would like to mention the MANDEVTEL project, Management Development for Telecommunications, to assist high-level managers to update or acquire modern management skills, most especially during the complex transformation processes that most telecommunication organizations are facing today.

It is important to remark that these projects are of a cooperative-type requiring the active participation and true commitment of the various partners involved. Only through their genuine agreement and combined inputs/resources will it be possible to achieve the necessary synergy to attain the objectives of such projects.

Recently, at the Asia and Pacific Regional Preparatory Meeting for the World Telecommunication Development Conference, Member states supported the use of the Internet as the best-fit technology to access e-learning. They also recognized that human resources functions should be equipped with IT knowledge as early as possible to stem the losses of capable people from the organization.

An important output of this meeting was a list of 12 draft Recommendations on human Resources management and development among which I would like to underline the followings:

"The meeting expressed strong support to the ASP Center of Excellence activities, and said they should continue by developing a clear strategic plan which should be endorsed via a high-level regional meeting"

"The Pacific Islands sub-region has unique characteristics and thus unique needs. Distance learning through the use of ICT is specifically suited for their situation and may be the key solution to help satisfy its unique characteristics and needs."

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

As the APEC economies hammer out policy approaches in individual economies and within the region, we would like you to heed what some of your counterparts in telecom have been saying. Historically, co-operation has been at least as important as liberalization in this region to meet the challenges ahead. The ITU is a key player in telecommunication issues, which includes by essence Information Technologies, and the ITU is ready to share its experiences with you and extend our demonstrated competence in particular in the domain of human capacity building.

I sincerely hope that this APEC High Level Meeting on Human Capacity Building will reach all its objectives which, I understand, are fully coherent with the purpose of the International Telecommunication

Union.

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