State Secretary in the Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Telecommunications Tatjana Matić, has said that after the realisation of the retraining and additional trainings programmes for women in ICT, launched by the Ministry last year, around 250 new female software developers have been trained.
When handing over the certificates to the participants in the “IT Girls” project of Vojvodina ICT Cluster, in the Education Centre of the AP Vojvodina, Ms Matić has stated that apart from this project participated by 22 women, by the end of April courses have been completed within all nine projects selected in the competition of the Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Telecommunications.
“Projects have been conducted in Novi Sad, Novi Pazar, Vranje Kragujevac, Zrenjanin, and Belgrade. The number of interested candidates significantly exceeded the initially planned number of participants, why we are going to expand the retraining programme. Since the majority of registered women are unemployed, aged between 20 and 40, and more than a half are with university degree, these data illustrate the new need of the labour market in the Republic of Serbia, and provide additional indicators for the continuation of the programme”, Ms Matić has emphasized.
She has reminded that the programme was launched in line with the digital policy of Serbian Government, and the measures for raising the staff capacities of the Strategy for IT Industry Development, as well as with the aim to overcome the gender gap in the digital industry and encourage the gender equality.
“In Serbia there are only around 15% of women when it comes to the profession in the field of telecommunication and computer technology, and the situation in Europe is not much better, with 3.1 times more men in this sector. A smaller number of women in IT means a smaller number of women in all innovative economic sectors in the future to be developed through the IT, i.e. on more desired and more paid professions”, Ms Matić warned.
She has also announced that IT companies, and other companies in need of IT staff, will be invited to hire new female software developers, for which a significant role will have the associations realising the projects, i.e. IT communities, already networked with the economic sector.
