It’s terribly unfortunate that even in this day and age, women have yet to be completely incorporated in the tech world. The territory is still considered male-dominated, with women occupying less than 30% of tech jobs. To bring a change in this scenario, there should be a great contribution from both govt. and non-govt. sector. From this concept, ICT camp was organized specially for women at New Model University College under the initiative of Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) on 12th November, 2019. A total of 92 undergrad female students of this college participated in this camp. This camp was designed with four sessions throughout the day. The camp was inaugurated by Md. Ruhul Amin, Principal of the college. Also present were Mahmudul Hasan Rizvi, head of the college's computer science and engineering department, and Jasmine Akhter, assistant program officer of BdOSN.
The first session of the camp was "Career Opportunities and Growth at BPO for Women". This session includes the brief discussion about the opportunity for women in the workplace of BPO industry. Sabrina Haque, Process Head of BPO Operations and Quality Control Management of Impel Service and Solutions Limited, a leading BPO company in the country, has conducted this session. Sabrina Haque commented that a woman can work in this field only if she has the mentality of team management, spontaneous attitude, the mentality of proving herself and basic knowledge of information technology. Science or non-science, students of any department can build their position in BPO industry with basic knowledge of information technology.
Achia Nila, the founder of Women in Digital, also conducted the second session of the camp to unveil the huge door that opens the door to women's work in the information technology workplace. This session was entitled with “Opportunities for girls and women in ICT World”. In the current age of information technology, women are now working in equal rhythm with men, using skills such as artificial intelligence, block chains, big data, programming, etc. She encourages students to become entrepreneurs by applying their innovative thinking.
She also cited the example of his own organization as all the workers of her organization is female. She mentioned that there are many jobs being created for women in Bangladesh. All they need is women skills and awareness as well.”
Another session on digital marketing titled “Digital & Social Media Marketing as a Career” was conducted by Ruhul Amin Rony, Head of Digital Communications at SSL Wireless. He has been working with digital marketing for more than 10 years. He gives students a complete idea of how easily product acceptance can be increased through market analysis.
The last session of the camp on graphics design and freelancing was conducted by Emrazina Islam, co-founder of Emrazina Technologies. The session was entitled with “Graphic Design to Freelance Career Design-A path to discover”. She gave students ideas on the topics of graphics design and freelancing. Women are now opting for areas like outsourcing through image editing, logo design, etc. She said that anyone starting with a basic idea can build a career in this industry.
Beside the ICT camp, a three-day long programming camp and a career talk has been organized in this college. Programming Camp named Grace Hopper Girls Programming Camp has been organized with 41 participants where 31 participants are female students on 13, 14 and 16th November, 2019. Through this camp students acquired knowledge on the programming language, online contest, online platform and online judge. After this camp, students took place in an online programming contest. The winner of this contest were awarded with certificates and crests.
To provide a clear concept about what the current and future profession might look like and the required skill for surviving this new world of technology, a career talk has been organized in the same college on 16th November. Munir Hassan, head of Youth Program, Daily Prothom Alo and general secretary of BDOSN conducted this event.The prevailing trend of the current job, half of it will disappear within the next few years. There will be new workplaces where there are only opportunities for technical job such as Big Data, Machine Learning, Block Chain, Cyber Security, Data mining or Artificial Intelligence. The market will occupy around 1 crore new jobs in the next 20 years. Munir Hasan said that those who prepared themselves, they would survive in the world of technology. He told the students that in order to survive the next day, you must be a problem solver. If you can find a smart solution to those problems which exist in all around, then there will be entrepreneurs, chip designers, robotics experts, cyber specialists or data scientists.
Public university students have many opportunities to prepare themselves for the current job market, but students of national universities are lagging behind. With that in mind, BdOSN has organized an ICT camp, a three-day long programming camp and a career talk. Under the three years project uner BdOSN aims to promote a pool of skilled women worker who can lead the future economy of our country.