Ingenieur Vol 68 Oct-Dec 2016 | Page 51

school transition is crucial. This can be achieved by providing early exposure to the real workinglife environment of the globally competitive ICT industry. 2.Attracting and Facilitating Global Talent Besides nurturing local talent, it is important to look beyond Malaysia to source for Malaysian talent. As such, outreach efforts must be conducted to generate greater awareness of career and collaboration opportunities at home. After that, there must be support mechanisms in place to facilitate top-notch returning talent and expatriates. 3.Building Networks of Top Talent Next, it is important to develop a pool of business talent to form a high value network to advance the country’s strategic vision of an innovationled economy. This entails a two-pronged strategy of developing a diasporic network and engaging the expatriate community. The former entails establishing networks by key sectors and geographies to ease access to opportunities and to enable contributions from abroad. The latter entails strengthening networks with leading foreign corporations and creating strong linkages with them. The emphasis on talent is based on the recognition that Malaysia cannot build a knowledge-based and innovation-led economy without the necessary talent to drive it. Over the years, the Government has invested heavily in nurturing local talent. But the harsh reality of global competition means that the war for talent is very real indeed. This is a situation that obviously has to be reversed. A country lacking in talent could result in industries impeded from investing and growing. This in turn could dampen job opportunities, which could then result in a more severe brain drain, triggering a vicious cycle of a reduced talent force and a weakened economy. Using developed nations as a benchmark, Malaysia needs to be as globally competitive in its ability to produce, retain and attract talent. As such, the Government is taking action to boost talent availability. T hi s t o g e t h e r w i t h t h e Ec o n o mi c Transformation Programme drives transformative investments, which in turn creates high value- added employment opportunities. And thus, an essential cycle of investment, job creation, talent inflow and further transformative investment would be created. Being a high-income nation will involve the creation of modern innovation-led jobs within a highly digital Malaysian economy. It will be no easy feat but a strong partnership between the government and leading global technology companies, working together in close co-operation is the right formula for achieving that vision. Malaysian Global Training Centre – collaboration with Huawei Technologies The Malaysian Government and Huawei Technologies signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop some 10,000 telecommunication professionals over a five-year period through the establishment of a Malaysian Global Training Centre (MGTC). With an investment of RM90 million in terms of equipment and infrastructure, the facility is designed to provide the latest telecommunication and ICT technology training to Huawei global customers from the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America countries. The global training hub is expected to contribute up to an accumulated RM1.2 billion of Gross National Income (GNI) by 2020 with an average of 20,000 trainee days of workload per year. The MGTC is also collaborating with 10 local universities across the country to set up a Huawei University Training Lab in each of the university campuses. With this comes more human capital development programmes such as “Train the Trainer”. The MGTC in Cyberjaya was set up with the objective to develop local workers into top-notch global ICT talent in line with the needs of Digital Malaysia. The MGTC has multiple labs offering comprehensive and cutting edge telecommunication technologies. The labs are capable of simulating an end-to-end live network environment linking the IMS Convergence Lab, the Access Lab and the Wireless Lab with the Core Network. 49