Interview with Célio Antunes de Souza, Founder and CEO of Impacta

I would like to ask you about higher education in Brazil. Are the schools preparing the students for the jobs of tomorrow? What are the challenges for universities in Brazil?

The biggest challenge for higher education in Brazil is to give the students more complete training. Nowadays, the globalised market demands a student with a global vision and that cannot be confined to the specific characteristics of an area; it has to include a wider range of skills and of training, too. Basically, the students need to have a systemic vision. To achieve this, universities, along with the Impacta Group, have specifically been developing a methodology in which students have this global vision.

In a more detailed manner, the challenge for higher education institutions in Brazil is currently related to the bigger educational groups that are merging, creating institutions with cheaper tuition fees and a student body of a higher volume. It is a market trend and we accompany it in the publications of the Keepers of Teaching Union. This is an increasing merging trend, along with the rise of focus on excellence in schools with higher tuition fees that have a more privileged concept in the market, that are more business and entrepreneurship oriented. You either have mass institutions that are merged, sold or bought, or you have excellence and focus institutions. For that, you need to excel in an area of knowledge. For instance, in São Paulo, we have a university dedicated to propaganda and marketing, with higher tuition fees, a very strong concept and a niche of students looking for this excellence. Another example would be an administration faculty like ESPM. Impacta has been able to make its mark in this technology management and design area. In a nutshell, the challenge is to decide whether to go into a mass direction or to reinforce your market niche.

As I said, students need to have an increasing global vision to apply their skills to generate business solutions, to align their knowledge with management. For example, there is no point in having a programmer that is a great technician but has no idea how a company works or how the software he develops can improve his business segment.

Large groups of investors are currently arriving in Brazil and Impacta has been approached by them. We have been growing with our own internal resources, but we have many proposals we are looking into. We are considering what the best is for Impacta in Brazil and what can potentially help us expand into the foreign market.

What is the importance of IT education in Brazil nowadays?

Research shows that companies explore less than 5% of the software potential they acquire. So, if you don't even use 5%, why are you going to get other software or other versions? You need to explore the advantages of the technological resources you already have. For this, employees need to become more aware and to make more use of the tools that are available in order to become more productive. Human activity, whether it be entrepreneurial or personal productivity, cannot be disassociated from the IT that helps increase this productivity, communication and efficiency. IT provides tools that are of a tremendous help to the business world, making companies more productive, effective and profitable.

You have been considered the largest IT training company in Brazil for the 5th consecutive year. What makes you keep being awarded this distinction? What is your strategy?

I have been involved in this area since 1981. I was a partner in the biggest computer industry in Brazil – Microtech – in a time when the commerce was limited. At that time, the market had only national IT companies. This is where I gained experience and that has been in continuing expansion. When I first came in, this industry would make 36,000 dollars of revenue; when I left, it had a profit of 130 million dollars – a value that nowadays is not even considered to be very high, since it is a huge market now. Microtech was then sold to an American company, Digital, and it was at that point that a new challenge appeared before me: what would I do with my life from then on, where would I invest my efforts? After much consideration and advice from my friends, I decided that education in Brazil would be the way to go, since it is an area that is in need and IT education is a gateway for better education.

The Impacta Group started with a small classroom in the Paulista Avenue which is the economical and financial centre of Brazil. We started focusing on the companies' technological needs with a high level of quality. That would be our differentiator, the quality we present in passing the information to the professionals and companies. We also have the Publishing Company Impacta with more than 300 didactical materials. Every chapter has a practical element to it (for example, a student learns 5 to 10 skills and develops them in the end by practicing). It is indeed a worldwide class material. We also make daily assessments of the students' performance, to assess strengths and needs. We also have a very strict quality control and we have created a certificate, similar to ISO9000 of the individual, which is a professional certificate that nowadays has a great impact in the market. Pearson's Manual, that has the best practices in development assessed by HR professionals, has a chapter dedicated to IT and practically all references are made in relation to Impacta and our certificate ICS (Impacta Certified Specialist). We have a great body of work and knowledge, with our 300 courses and also this certificate that has an increased value in the market.

After this growth, we created a technical college that helps German companies. We established a partnership with the Brazilian-German Chamber that assembled all the labs for Mechatronics and Industrial Informatics. Afterwards, we constituted the Impacta Faculty with cutting edge technology, in a partnership with Canadian Smarts. All classes capture all content that has been taught throughout. In this manner, all students have access to all units of knowledge stored in the university, and not only those related to their course. This has made a huge difference in the students we prepare, because they have more extensive knowledge and training that can make a difference in the corporate world. We also developed a post-graduation and MBA centre which has been very successful and we are currently in a globalization phase of the Impacta Group and the creation of an education portal.

We are pioneers and we have managed to keep growing and innovating, whereas our competitors have been a bit behind. Other schools use imported materials, not fit for the Brazilian students, and so they haven't been able to meet the expectations in place at the moment. I can honestly say that in the last 20 years, more than 20 competitors have left the market. They have not developed their market, their technologies, their know-how. That's why Impacta has for the 5th year in a row been considered the biggest training and technology center in Brazil and also the biggest certification and IT center of Latin America.

What are the markets needs and services you envision will be required in 5 years' time?

Not only is knowledge a precious factor and do companies need their employees prepared, but the decision to invest in technology and the way to do it are important questions. Sometimes companies decide to outsource and it becomes very expensive. They become dependent of a certain type of technology. In Brazil, there is a large quantity of companies that have their own technological area and that develop their own software. Impacta noticed this and since we have more than 300 professionals and 200 masters and doctors, we have now a knowledge pyramid and we pay special attention to the business consulting area. We are not only preparing the professionals, but we are also helping companies develop their own information systems. This is a new challenge for Impacta and it puts us today in the front row of service delivery. This is all due to the intelligence support we have been building for the last 24 years.

So, you are moving towards consulting.

Yes, other companies are doing the same. Take Stefanini, for example. You first start off with professional training, and then you move to consulting.

Stefanini is expanding to Romania at the moment. What is your international strategy now?

Impacta wishes to license all of its didactic material to schools all around the world. We have closed a deal with a university in Peru that will along with us translate all the 300 didactic materials to Spanish, in order to help us enter the Hispanic market. We are also currently in negotiations with a large European publishing company that may show our material to 40 countries. Overall, our material can be used to support schools across the globe.

We also train teachers so that they can better educate their students. This is our main goal for the next 5 years.

And what are presently the biggest challenges Impacta faces?

The biggest challenge now is the need to capitalize. We are the suppliers of FISK Informatic, for example, a network of a thousand schools in Brazil. All the schools have their own IT laboratories. We sell all the methodology and content to these schools. Bit Company, which is a very large group here in Brazil, focuses on English education and basic IT. We are offering aggregated content value to them, because that is where Impacta is strong. If this project continues to grow, it might become available to the whole network of schools with basic IT. We offer the content and e-learning to the students. We have also launched the Portal for Distance learning which we believe will be very important. We have already sold some of our courses and around 2000 students are doing our distance learning courses. Our Portal will also have all the support from Element K and Soft Skills, which are renowned e-learning companies.

We have also closed a very important deal with Mackenzie University which is connected to 500 Presbyterian schools. As already mentioned, we train the teachers, supply the didactic material in any area (networks, software, web design, graphic design). The school chooses the training that interests them and the teacher spreads the knowledge. The teacher is an essential element, because he has the pedagogical approach to add to our offer.

What is your message to the international community?

The Impacta Technology Education Group has the best technological teaching methodology in the world. CIO's of Brazil said it themselves. For instance, the CIO for Tecban (biggest bank support company in Brazil) has said we have "an excellent methodology of world class quality". Twenty five thousand companies in Brazil use our methodology. We have had almost one million students here at Impacta. In our international expansion, we want to offer our services to the world and we are ready to deliver them to the companies, schools and students. We are open to receive your contacts and to assist you in the best way we can.