More than 1,000 peo­ple re­spond­ed to an ad­ver­tise­ment from TSTT last No­vem­ber for grad­u­ates in­ter­est­ed in a ca­reer train­ing ini­tia­tive as the com­pa­ny sought to restart its Grad­u­ate In Train­ing (GIT) Pro­gramme.TSTT's GIT Pro­gramme gives re­cent grad­u­ates an 18-month in­tern­ship with the tele­coms provider. On Ash Wednes­day, while many peo­ple were shak­ing off the af­ter-ef­fects of the great­est show on earth, an en­ter­pris­ing band of 20 se­lect­ed in­terns filed in­to TSTT's of­fices across the coun­try to take up their first as­sign­ments.

The stu­dents come with back­grounds as di­verse as the ca­reers in TSTT–en­gi­neer­ing, law, busi­ness man­age­ment, com­mu­ni­ca­tion stud­ies, fi­nance and risk man­age­ment. Dur­ing their ori­en­ta­tion, they were greet­ed by mem­bers of TSTT's board of di­rec­tors, act­ing CEO George Hill and oth­er mem­bers of TSTT's ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment team.

Di­rec­tor Ravi Rati­ram not­ed that the GIT pro­gramme was be­ing in­tro­duced at a time when TSTT was on the thresh­old of trans­form­ing with state-of-the-art tech­nol­o­gy, so the road ahead would be filled with chal­lenges and op­por­tu­ni­ties for those in­terns will­ing to work hard.

"TSTT is poised to pro­vide sus­tain­able growth and de­vel­op­ment to Trinidad and To­ba­go and GIT par­tic­i­pants have a rare op­por­tu­ni­ty to be a part of that jour­ney," he said.

CEO George Hill em­pha­sised that the in­terns were step­ping in­to a large dy­nam­ic tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven en­vi­ron­ment and would have to keep pace with the needs of the com­pa­ny. He de­scribed TSTT as a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar op­er­a­tion with an­nu­al cap­i­tal projects be­tween $400�$600 mil­lion, with a staff com­ple­ment of more than 2,600, strong in­dus­try fun­da­men­tals and ro­bust fixed and mo­bile net­works reach­ing 98 per cent of pop­u­lat­ed ar­eas in T&T.

"We are con­tin­u­ous­ly de­ploy­ing new tech­nol­o­gy and with trends in wire­less sub­sti­tu­tion; rise of tablet-type de­vices; con­sumer de­mand for ac­cess every­where and any­time, TSTT is as­sid­u­ous­ly work­ing to­wards ex­ceed­ing the ex­pec­ta­tions of our cus­tomers and main­tain­ing our com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage. As a GIT in­tern you have a lot of op­por­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges ahead and we are hop­ing this will bring out the best in you," Hill said.

Ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of hu­man re­sources Harigob­in Jhinkoo said the pro­gramme pro­vides TSTT with "a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty to hone and de­vel­op the skills and tal­ent of the next gen­er­a­tion of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sion­als".Jhinkoo, who was in­stru­men­tal in get­ting the green light for the pro­gramme, said the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the par­tic­i­pants and TSTT would be "syn­er­gis­tic and mul­ti­fold" as both par­ties are am­ply po­si­tioned to ben­e­fit from each oth­er through the ex­change of knowl­edge.

In­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy grad­u­ate and suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cant Sade Brown is pos­i­tive that the GIT pro­gramme will bridge the gap by pro­vid­ing young grad­u­ates with much need­ed prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence to com­ple­ment their the­o­ret­i­cal frame­works.

Brown, whose first ro­ta­tion is in TSTT's in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy (IT) sys­tems de­part­ment, said: "I'm re­al­ly look­ing for­ward to be­ing ex­posed to the dif­fer­ent ar­eas in IT and I hope that this ex­pe­ri­ence can give me greater di­rec­tion and in­form my de­ci­sion re­gard­ing which spe­cif­ic area I would like to spe­cialise in, in the fu­ture."

Dur­ing their 18-month stint in the or­gan­i­sa­tion, trainees will be ro­tat­ed every six months in de­part­ments that most close­ly re­late to their area of spe­cial­i­sa­tion. Al­though par­tic­i­pants are not guar­an­teed em­ploy­ment at the end of the pe­ri­od, most of them felt the net­work­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties and ex­pe­ri­ence will make them more at­trac­tive can­di­dates on the job mar­ket.