According to Electrical and Electronics Productivity Nexus Key Strategy 1 chairman Dr Hari Narayanan, the country should take advantage of these opportunities by focusing on the top concerns of industry, which is talent supply, especially for the electrical and electronics industry.“The E&E industry continues to receive investments, both from foreign multinational corporations and local companies and we need to ensure that these expansions are not hampered by the lack of engineers.
Additionally, to assist companies to adopt the appropriate fourth industrial revolution elements in their operations, it has organised Plugfest 1.0, which focuses on industrial Internet of Things, Plugfest 2.0, artificial intelligence -based machine vision system and webinars on IR4.0 by EEPN technology centres. It has also engaged RWTH Aachen University, Germany to provide advanced upskilling in terms of IR4.0 training.
SIAP, a university enhancement and embedment programme for IC design, has six modules and these were developed via a series of intense sessions with more than 10 companies facilitated by subject matter experts from Mimos and CREST. “There’s still a lot of work to be done and unfortunately, when we initiated this about 10 months ago, then came the Covid-19 pandemic, so we have experienced some delays.”
“As we rolled out SIAP as a pilot project to the seven universities, we also trained over 100 lecturers from various universities . We hope to complete the year with 65 additional lecturers trained, ” he said.According to Dr Hari, there are several ways the government could further improve this situation and produce talents that are industry ready.
According to Dr Wan Zuhainis, her division oversees all programmes in universities and making sure that all programmes offered are relevant to the industry. “We do not only monitor the programme; we hope that we are facilitating the universities, engaging the industry to identify the gaps and shoes to work together for us to produce this future workforce - not only with the industries, with other agencies and inter ministries collaboration, ” she said.
“We hope the industries and universities can co-own the programme and take responsibilities-SIAP is a very good example.”According to Dr Hari, to strengthen collaboration between industry, government and universities, there is a need for more focused industry advisory panels for selected areas by the universities, so that industry subject matter experts can provide the academia the latest technology and application trends in the industry.