BP has opened a new laboratory at Baku Engineering University to help the educational institution train highly qualified information and communications technology (ICT) and cybersecurity professionals for Azerbaijan, Report informs.

The laboratory is a modern facility with 30 items of advanced and innovative ICT equipment and software that bp has specifically procured and installed at the university.

It is expected that around 1,000 teachers and students will use the laboratory annually improving their ICT knowledge and skills as well as learning to operate innovative ICT, create and maintain secure and efficient information systems and overall embrace digital transformation. These will be mainly students majoring in computer engineering, ICT, computer sciences and cyber/information security.

“We are pleased to open this new facility that will help the university raise the quality of teaching and learning of ICT and cybersecurity skills in particular, and other engineering capabilities in general. Needless to say how important ICT is in our daily life and therefore developing a skill set that includes cybersecurity, data analysis, network management, software development and other related fields can open the door to many exciting career opportunities.

In a wider sense, ICT has immense economic significance as it is used in almost in all fields from e-commerce, e-governance, banking, transport to agriculture, education and medicine. We can’t imagine our daily life without ICT services and applications. The stronger a country’s ICT capabilities and its people’s skills are the safer their information systems will be. We hope our project will contribute to the efforts to build the needed skills to ensure online security and safety in the country,” said Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli, BP’s vice president for the Caspian region.

The project started in May 2023 and has been completed well before the due date which is November 2024.

The total cost of the project is around 403,000 manats (around $237,000).