Creating jobs in
IT in Morocco

Addressing a pressing need for IT talent in Morocco

Morocco is in great need of IT talent. Both Moroccan and foreign companies operating in the country struggle to find experts with the digital skills they need. Such skills are highly valued by local and international competitors given the ever-growing demand for IT talent. This shortage is compounded by a mismatch between the IT training provided by Moroccan higher education institutions and the real needs of companies.

To bridge this gap, the Moroccan subsidiary of Atos, a multinational IT and digital services company, launched the Atos Campus Programme. This six-month training and work experience programme sought to increase the employability of young IT talent in Morocco’s information and communication technology industry. To encourage job creation in the country, Invest for Jobs supported the programme from 2022 to 2023.

Technical training, cross-cutting skills development and work experience

The Atos Campus Programme proposed a two-stage learning experience. The first stage, which lasted three months, consisted of training the young participants in the areas of IT most sought-after by companies in the sector, such as programming, integration of management and decision-support software packages, and quality assurance. The course content was taught by Atos experts who used practical exercises and real case studies to pass on their experience and knowledge to the young trainees.

In addition to the technical subject matter, the participants also received training in public speaking, problem solving, teamworking, leadership and the cross-cutting skills needed to build a successful career in the digital field.

Once they completed this training, the young trainees were assigned to a three-month paid internship at Atos client companies in Morocco. These internships, which were supervised by Atos experts, gave the participants the chance to apply what they learned to real-life projects. It was an opportunity to fully immerse themselves in a business environment where they could experience working on the job for the first time and develop their professional networks.

At the end of the Atos Campus Programme, Atos selected the participants with the greatest abilities, technical expertise and motivation to join their team.

From training to job creation

During this programme, which ran between May 2022 and June 2023, the Atos Campus Programme has been completed by two cohorts of some 30 trainees each, around a third of them women.

A total of 30 good jobs have been created at Atos through the programme. In addition, 28 trainees have secured employment in other companies in the sector, thanks to the valuable skills they acquired during the training.

The cooperation with Atos was part of the activities carried out by the Digital Skills Accelerator Africa (DSAA), an association of digital services companies of which Atos is a member. With support of Invest for Jobs, DSAA aims to train and employ young African IT talent. The initiative with Atos was first launched in Senegal and subsequently extended to Morocco, Egypt and Côte d’Ivoire. Overall, nearly 700 people have benefited from trainings in all four partner countries since November 2021.

Atos – a member company of the Digital Skills Accelerator Africa was supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in the framework of the Special Initiative “Decent Work for a Just Transition” of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).