At the tenth anniversary of Cisco's (CSCO) China Networking Academy held in Chengdu, Sichuan, the company announced that it would further enhance cooperation with the Sichuan government and Sichuan Education Department to establish 50 new academies in the next three years to realize 100% coverage of this project in Sichuan's institutes of higher learning.

The Cisco Networking Academy project entered China in 1998. By cooperation with universities and institutes, the project aims to train senior network technology professionals with the help of its advanced network materials and the world's top e-learning platform. Over the past ten years, Cisco has established over 200 such academies in 70 Chinese cities, in which about 100,000 students have been trained.

Cisco plans to build 300 new networking academies in China in the next three years, of which 50 will be located in Sichuan. At the same time, it will enlarge the number of its cooperated universities from 139 to over 220. By 2011, the total number of Cisco Networking Academy in China is expected to be over 500, providing about 100,000 new IT talents and 200 qualified teachers for the technology industry.