Darrell Greer
Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (Apr 14/04) - A number of students at Alaittuq high school and Nunavut Arctic College in Rankin Inlet were brought up to speed on the promise of information technology (IT) as a career choice earlier this month.

Patrick Tagoona, the president of Kiggavik Training and Consulting Services in Rankin Inlet, says the IT presentations were a follow-up, of sorts, to the December 2003 Career Fair.

Tagoona says the focus of the presentations was on TeKnoWave, Canada's first national aboriginal IT program.

The sessions were facilitated by John Leggitt of the Willis College of Business and Technology in Ottawa, Beverley McKiver of Donna Cona, the aboriginal information and technology company that set up most of Nunavut's IT infrastructure in 1999, and aboriginal IT student Joselyn Grant.

IT a growing opportunity

"There's going to be a growing opportunity in the IT field during the next few years," says Tagoona.

"With high speed broadband coming to all 25 Nunavut communities, that's going to provide new opportunities for training and economic development.

"Even the implementation of community Web sites will allow people from the south to see what our communities have to offer."

Leggitt says once broadband is in place, the IT landscape of the North will change dramatically.

He says people will be able to connect to the Internet, and send and receive email much faster at home or at work.

Richer content such as multimedia, E-learning, research and numerous other applications will also be readily available.

Not what Nunavut wants

"Nunavut brings a lot of people up from the south to do IT implementations and that's not what the territory wants to do in the long run," says Leggitt.

"By offering young people a career in IT and going through different programs such as TeKnoWave, a wide range of job potential will be created, including Web design, multimedia creation, hardware and network design, installation and maintenance and software development.

"Broadband is also going to further open up the possibilities for distance education partnerships with southern learning institutes."