MERIThON: new collaborative initiatives to address the shortage of ICT professionals

Event Type: Event
Event date: Saturday, April 27, 2024
The start of the event: 10:00 a.m
End of event: Saturday, April 27, 2024
Venue: Sauletekios al. 11, Vilnius

On April 27, a new international initiative is launched, which aims to reduce the problem of the lack of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) specialists – an ideathon-type event “MERIThON” will be held. This is one of the measures that try to solve the problem of the lack of specialists in the rapidly developing ICT sector, which currently accounts for 3 percent in the European Union. It is estimated that Europe currently needs more than 350,000 ICT professionals, and it is predicted that in the coming years, up to 90 percent of jobs will require specific ICT skills.

According to VILNIUS TECH professor Simona Ramanauskaitė, “In Lithuania and Europe we are still not able to attract more people to study or retrain and become ICT specialists. Less than 8 percent of Lithuanian graduates choose computing studies. The numbers of those who decide to change their career and retrain are vanishingly small.”

“MERIThON” is an activity of the MERIT project, partially financed by the European Union, which aims to involve the widest possible range of market actors in the creation of ICT value chains. As Edgaras Kriukovis, the representative of “Saulėtekios Tech Park” in the “MERIT” project, specified, “The aim of this event is to help organizations develop innovative ICT solutions – the participants of the event will look for possible solutions, new ideas to solve the challenges presented by organizations.” Later, MERIT project study program students from various countries will try to realize the ideas generated in their master’s theses. We hope that at least some of them will establish closer ties with the organization that proposed the challenge or create their own startup. Involvement in the initiative is a mutual benefit: for organizations – to increase their level of digitalization, and for students – to work with relevant, innovative ideas and technologies”.

Closer relations between students and business representatives will take time, but already today business companies believe in the benefits of such cooperation and are actively involved in MERIThON activities. Ideathon-type event “MERIThON” is international, its participants will look for solutions to challenges in Vilnius and Manresa (Spain), challenge tasks will be presented, participants will be provided with consultations and prizes will be established by organizations of various profiles operating in Lithuania and other European countries: Everwest Group of logistics companies; NOD Baltic – ESET official representative in Lithuania; National Cyber ​​Security Center; data analytics firm Exacaster; Office of the Equal Opportunity Commissioner; STEKAS, a closed joint-stock company offering financial accounting solutions; a small community creating websites oxaDIGIT, Accenture, asya, Asoindel, expertware, nuclia, onLASER, F2R Engineering. Therefore, the solutions invented by the participants will become visible on an international scale, and in the future they may be applied more widely.

Paulius Mantulov, Head of Information Technology at Everwest Group, says that the company positively evaluates rapidly developing artificial intelligence solutions: “Those who have not encountered logistics have no idea how many digitized solutions we use in our daily business operations. Therefore, we believe in the potential and benefits of applying innovation to achieve high results linked to the company’s strategic goals. Any obstacle, challenge can have more than one solution – we are always looking for the best ways and ways to solve problems. We are looking forward to the event, because we believe that it is here that new ideas and solutions will be born, opening up new opportunities, which are relevant not only for us, but also for the entire field of logistics”.

The National Cyber ​​Security Center and NOD Baltic, representing the field of cyber security, want to see active involvement of the participants in the challenges being solved during this event. According to Tomas Parnarauskas, the head of NOD Baltic, “It’s nice to see how energetic and active people live now, how creative they are in solving various problems. It is the desire to improve and actively take action when faced with difficulties that often determines not only the individual’s further career, but also the potential of the entire country. By contributing personally, as a company or organization, we create an innovative community and state in cooperation. All great things start with an idea and the first step, even at events like this one.”