By Tan Weizhen

THE Government is setting aside $125 million to implement relief measures to keep the infocomm industry growing in these bad times.

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It will strengthen three help schemes to help up to 10,000 IT professionals keep their jobs and to train the next generation of such professionals.

Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lee Boon Yang, speaking at the IT Leader Awards last night, listed three schemes that will be beefed up:

# The National Infocomm Competency Framework: This is an online information portal which identifies the skills IT professionals of varying levels of seniority need, and lists where they can get training to sharpen these skills. The number of infocomm jobs on which information is available on the website has ballooned from 30 to over 200, including IT positions in financial and health-care companies.

# Critical Infocomm Technology Resource Programme: From April 1, those who sign up for training in infocomm will have the course and examination fees subsidised by 80 per cent, up from 50 per cent.

Firms sponsoring their employees for such courses will be compensated $50 for each day of training. This programme will cost the Government $25 million.

# More funding for infocomm scholarships: An additional $30 million will be put into the existing National Infocomm Scholarship and the new Integrated Infocomm Scholarship, meant for O-level students to pursue infocomm courses from polytechnic through university.

The rest of the $125 million will go towards supporting small and medium-sized enterprises and the rest of the infocomm industry, so they can develop infocomm solutions and encourage the adoption of IT.

Dr Lee is confident that the measures will see the industry through the recession and get it ready for when the economy turns around.

At the 13th IT Leader Awards, five individuals were lauded for their contributions to the industry.

Mr Robert Chew, chairman of the government-supported IT Standards Committee, was named IT Leader of the Year.

Mr Rakesh Kumar Gupta, founder of educational software firm Heulab, took the Young Professional of the Year award.

The Hall of Fame award, which recognises individuals who helped shape the development of IT here over time, went to Ms Pearleen Chan, a consultant at consulting firm Accenture.

Two clinched the IT Youth award. One was full-time national serviceman Loke Lup Peng, 20, who popularised IT among his peers while in Temasek Polytechnic; the other was 24-year-old Winnie Soh, a freelance software developer and co-founder of Dream Axis, a company which creates virtual worlds.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.