IT skills gap costs Brunei job opportunities

IMAGINE if the next big thing to come out on the Internet was by a Bruneian company?

This is precisely what companies such as Expansys are finding themselves targeting and spurring them on to success.

For Expansys Managing Director Keeran Janin, although his company is already noted for being the first Bruneian company to develop an application for Facebook, they're not resting on their laurels.

"We're trying to find other niches to see how that goes. You can try things but then again it is quite difficult," he says.

"Our challenge is that Brunei doesn't have thousands of developers that are hungry looking for jobs."

The stark differences are plain to see in the IT industry here in Brunei, he says. "In places like America and Singapore, you have developers who are dying for a job," Keeran stresses.

"If you put in an advert asking for a programmer to work with Facebook, you'd have 20 applicants vying for the job, but here in Brunei you need to put in 20 adverts just to get one applicant."

Currently, the Expansys team consists of just seven, including technical and non-technical staff, but Keeran is quick to point out that they are always looking for new talent to join them.

This skills gap has meant that in terms of development, some of the work needs to be outsourced to developers outside the country. The programmers who carry out the work abroad number about 10, explains Keeran.

"They are all separate, to protect our intellectual property.

"We do have our developers in Brunei. We design all the different areas, the blueprints, but because we don't have enough people to do the grunt work and coding, we separate that into 10 different modules," he says.

The modules are worked on independently by different programmers in India, who don't know each other and send the portions of code they have worked on back to Brunei.

"After this, we assemble it all together," adds Keeran.

"So everything major is done within Brunei and we know what we're doing," he adds.

To maintain the integrity of their work, Expansys ensure that anything deemed "critical" is kept in Brunei.

"We separate the parts of code to be outsourced, and anything that is core to us we keep here. It's the outside stuff, the Java script and graphic design that's sent out," he says, adding that it's simply a lack of local human resource that prevents them from carrying out the work here.

The Brunei Times