Furthering its goals to enhance IT talent development globally, Cisco today announced a country-specific initiatives aimed at expanding India’s capacity to train, employ and retain highly qualified networking and systems engineers. By establishing new partnerships and opening new testing facilities, Cisco aims to expand India’s networking workforce capacity to 360,000 engineers in the next five years, a six-fold increase over present employment levels.

As an integral part of the training development initiative, Cisco announced that two of India’s largest technology training organizations, IIHT and NIIT, have become Cisco Certified Learning Solutions Partners™. With this designation, both IIHT and NIIT join Global Knowledge and Datacraft in offering the complete range of Cisco training materials and certifications to students in more than 200 locations throughout the country.

In concert with these new partnerships, Cisco is also announcing a major push towards increasing access to its examination facilities through its primary test delivery partner, Pearson VUE. The company is committed to adding 150 testing facilities that meet these new requirements across India by the end of the year.