The second “ICT and the Business World Seminar” was organized on 30th of March 2017 and hosted by Gaziantep Chamber of Commerce in the scope of “Improving Capacity of Employees and Employers via Communication and Information Technologies” project (Bilgeiş), which is co-funded by the EU and Turkey and implemented by Middle East Technical University.

The event was organised in assembly hall of Gaziantep Chamber of Trade and attracted many participants from the world of business. Mr. Beyhan Hıdıroğlu, Chairman of the Executive Board; Prof.Dr. Kürşat Çağıltay from METU, Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, representatives of business community ın Gaziantep, and a large number of press members participated in the event. After his opening remarks, Mr. Hıdıroğlu stated that the most costly item for the business world is time, adding that this cost can be avoided by using technology.

Hıdıroğlu stated that it is a must to catch up with the technology and communication age and added: “If we do not want to be a part of the losers’ club in terms of the human resource, we have to adapt ourselves to this era, that is to increase our quality. How can we achieve this? The only way to achieve this is education, a life-long education. But we don’t have time to spend on education. At this point, the technology we are trying to catch up with is saving us. With the e-learning systems, the term ‘no time’ disappears. There, remains a desire for development. Our members whose most valuable capital is time, sometimes may not be able to spare time for the training programs organized within the body of our chamber. For this reason, our goal in the field of education is to be able to offer online education to our members. I am confident that we will achieve significant gains as we progress towards this goal with our Bilgeiş project.” Kürşat Çağıltay stated that they have carried out various activities within the scope of the project in order to determine the needs of SMEs and have developed courses with these in mind. Mr. Çağıltay stated that the number of courses that were currently available on the portal prepared within the scope of the project was 10 and that there would be 100 courses in the short term and added: “We consider 100 courses as a starting point and our goal is to reach 2023 courses in 2023. Our aim is to create a large e-courses pool.”

In the afternoon session of the seminar, “Brand Perception Management and Persuasion Techniques” training was provided free of charge to the participants.