Samsung to open academy for skilling youth

Electronics major Samsung has signed an agreement with the Union ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises to open the MSME-Samsung Digital Academy, to offer young students a skill development course based on the Tizen OS platform.

A statement issued by the company said that the academy is being set up with the objective of creating a pool of trained youth who can leverage the software development and testing opportunities presented by innovative digital technologies based on the Tizen OS.

As per the agreement, Samsung India Electronics will offer the Digital Academy course in collaboration with the ministry, and will seek to train youth to develop applications that run on the Tizen OS across a multitude of devices such as smartphones, televisions and tablets.

In its first phase, the academy will be rolled out across the 10 MSME-Samsung Technical Schools that have been set up by Samsung and the ministry of MSME. Each of these schools will run a four-week course in batches of 30 students.

The programme will eventually be scaled up to include 68 other MSME Technical Centres across the country, as well as Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology, National Institutes of Technology and other key institutes of technical education and engineering.

With a mix of theory and lab-based training, the inaugural Samsung Digital Academy course will cover topics such as an introduction to the Tizen platform, the Tizen app development process, testing and debugging, device Application Program Interface (APIs) as well as packaging and installation of designed apps on various devices.

Students will also be trained on how to migrate existing apps on to the Tizen platform. The curriculum will be developed by Samsung Research Institutes in Delhi and Bengaluru. Samsung will also provide the Tizen Software Development Kit (SDK) as well as Samsung Z1 phones for testing purposes.

Tizen is an open and adaptable platform offering multi-application capability across a wide range of devices, including smartphones, tablets and TVs. Samsung's first Tizen-based smartphone, the Samsung Z1, was launched in India earlier this year.

Rajiv Mishra, vice-president, Samsung India Electronics, said in a statement mailed in response to a Business Standard questionnaire that this is the global first initiative of Samsung in this area. MSME Centres will utilise their existing infrastructure and make use of PC labs to take the initiative forward. Samsung will offer Software Development Kits, train the trainer programmes for MSME faculty, training content, virtual platform for application testing, assessment methodology, mentoring and the Samsung Playstore for developers to sell the application, he added.