Pascal Sero, VP and Head of Oracle Labs, shares insights on expanding the company’s R&D center in Morocco and recruiting local talent.
This R&D centre in Morocco was started as a small lab way back in 2017 when we hired our first person — a PhD — and gradually built up the team. By just after COVID, we had grown to around 30 people.
It was initially meant to be just an exploratory lab setup.
But in 2022, our CEO came to visit. She was impressed by the country and by what we told her about the quality of engineering talent here. She said, “Why don’t you guys think about building a team of 1,000 people here, properly?” I was like, “Are you sure?” But she was serious — and here we are.
Last year, in 2024, we signed an agreement with the Ministry of Digital Transformation to formalize the creation of a development center with 1,000 jobs by the end of 2027. By September this year, we’ll be at 650 — so we’ve been growing like crazy in Morocco.
The education system here mandates a six-month internship as part of the final year of study. Once they finish that, we’re able to hire them. We’ve been leveraging this structure quite effectively to bring in new joiners. And to our surprise, we’ve received great feedback from hiring managers across our global teams — whether they’re based in India, Mexico, or elsewhere — saying that Moroccan students come out of school at a strong level.
To give you some stats: last year, 84% of our interns were converted into full-time hires. If you exclude those who didn’t meet the bar, the actual conversion rate is 94%. Our original target was 75%.
So yes — the feedback we get is that the talent level is very strong. The students are passionate, motivated, and the quality is high. The government is also very proactive in driving digital transformation. While there are many IT outsourcing firms here, what we’re doing is different. Our people in Morocco work on the same projects as our teams in India, Mexico, or the US. It’s part of Oracle’s global development structure.
We have only about 10 true Global Development Centers around the world, even though we operate in 175 countries. So this one in Morocco is quite strategic. We don’t have different tiers of centers — they’re all equal. Our teams here work on things like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) alongside teams from Europe, India, and Mexico. It’s a globally integrated setup.
As for specific technologies: most of the work is global, but here in Morocco, we also support Oracle’s Government Industry Solutions (GIS) business unit. For example, a digital government project that was started within that team is being developed right here.
To reach our goal of 1,000 developers, we are looking for skills in DevOps, Java, AI, cybersecurity — essentially the same profiles we’d hire anywhere else.
We are working closely with local universities to build the talent pipeline. In addition to our agreement with the Ministry of Digital Transformation, we also signed an MoU last year with the Ministry of Higher Education. Under this program, we’re offering free training and professional certifications in Oracle technologies — OCI, APEX, Java — to students from any school in Morocco.
Our target is to reach 10,000 students per year. We launched this officially less than a year ago and already have 8,000 students registered. We’re also working with universities and the government to see if we can integrate these certifications into their formal graduation requirements.
