This week, the CENGN team gathered together to celebrate our students as the first batch of Pharos LaaS certified professionals.

Last year, CENGN integrated an OPNFV Pharos Lab onto our Cloud Infrastructure in Kanata North. With the only Pharos community lab in Canada, we continue to provide developers of next generation technologies with access to top-notch test resources and expertise. Building off our mission to train the future innovators of the ICT industry, CENGN developed a Pharos Lab-as-a-Service

 program  exposing our students to the OPNFV project, networking technologies, and the open source community as a whole. The program is designed to teach and provide hands on experience for network engineering professionals in administering OpenStack using the OPNFV Pharos reference platform.

In today’s networking market, many companies are beginning to invest more in software development technologies like SDN and NFV.  Due to the novelty of this networking space, large SDN solution providers like Cisco and Juniper Networks have difficulties finding talent to virtualize their network function solutions. It is important therefore for tech students and professionals to gain experience and an understanding of these subject areas to fill in the current gaps in the job market. This is where CENGN comes in!

Since 2015, CENGN has brought in hundreds of students to train in various fields including Engineering, Project Management and Marketing. At the beginning of each work term, students undergo a boot camp program which orients them to CENGN’s work environment and the telecommunications industry in general. This Fall, boot camp had a little more to offer to our Engineering students. For three weeks, they were introduced to topics like Cloud & OpenStack Principles, Networking Fundamentals and NFVi Principles and Values, through theoretical and practical training sessions. At the end of the course, students took a lab exam to demonstrate their knowledge in these fundamental principles. Candidates had a lot to gain, going into the program, as they stood a chance to receive certification upon passing the exam.

CENGN is happy to congratulate our Engineering students, Sam Robillard, George Xavier, Siddharth Verma and Jaya Parimi, for embracing the challenge and successfully completing the Pharos LaaS Program. We’re confident that this certification will be a powerful addition to their skillset and make them stand out among their peers. We wish them the very best in their career goals and cannot wait to see how far they have progressed over the next few years. It is our hope that as the Pharos LaaS Program continues, CENGN will be able to offer this training and certification to the public and further foster a talent pool that will prop up the amazing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and multinational organizations running their tech business in Canada.

Learn more about the CENGN Pharos LaaS Program here.

Want to know more about our student opportunities? Click here.

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

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