Asia Pacific: Hot bed for engineering jobs?

Apparently engineering haven is here, according to an excellent article by Ron Schneiderman for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

He noted that the Asia-Pacific region, or APAC, is home to more than 60 percent of the world's population and many of its largest and most successful high-tech companies. So it's not surprising that the region is a hotbed of recruiting for technical professionals--especially engineers.

“Intel announced in February that it planned to hire 1000 software engineers this year, many of whom will be in Asia,” he wrote, quoting Lori Weber, Intel's global hiring director who said that the company had already hired around 50 percent of its initial goal by recruiting a combination of experienced and college graduate candidates.

Without giving any numbers, Webersaid some of the newly-hired software engineers will be based in Shanghai and India. "We will continue hiring outside the United States as needed to support our presence in the overseas markets, which generate approximately three-fourths of Intel's revenues."

Shneiderman also noted that Microsoft likewise has more than 100 openings for mostly software engineers in China and almost that many slots for engineers in India.

“Apparently in response to an increasingly competitive environment in recruiting and retaining top technical talent (Google gave out 10 percent pay raises this year), Microsoft says that beginning in September it will offer raises in salary and stock awards to attract and retain staff. As CEO Steve Balmer wrote in an internal e-mail to Microsoft employees, "... the changes we're rolling out will help ensure Microsoft continues to be the place that top talent comes to change the world."

Check out more of the article at the magazine’s online site.

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Oh boys, where art thou?

Looks like we are going to, or already are, get(ting) more females in the workforce if we were to judge from the entries in our universities.

The Star newspaper reported that more girls are getting places in universities than boys and this is worrying the Higher Education Ministry.

“It is not that the ministry is against female dominance at the local universities. But it is important to ensure a balanced growth for both genders,” the report quoted the minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin as saying.

He said male students made up just 35% of the overall intake at the local universities this year.

“This problem needs to be immediately addressed,” he said adding that however, there was a “healthy balance” of male and female students for technical-based courses.

“But we need to work on encouraging male students to enroll for other courses, too,” he said.

“Other than that, we have a shortage of students enrolling for science and technological based courses this year,” Mohamed Khaled said, adding that 5% of available seats for such courses were not taken.

“We will try and fix these problems at the secondary school level and hopefully, we will be able to achieve our target in future,” he said.

KPI for marketability of students

Is your university capable enough to enable you to get a job once you graduate? Well, there will be a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to figure that out.

In fact, graduate employability has been included as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for all vice-chancellors of public universities.

The Star newspaper quoted Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak as saying that the move was part of the long-term goal to raise the quality and marketability of local graduates.

“Others include introducing entrepreneurship curriculum, implementing soft skills programmes and student internship programmes in public and private corporations before the students graduate.

“Continuous dialogue between the universities and industry is being held to raise the quality of the graduates, an approach which is expected to reduce the mismatch between supply and demand for skilled manpower,” he said when launching the 1Malaysia Training Scheme (SL1M).

Najib said the Government was also implementing special programmes as a short-term measure to raise graduate employability and that included the training programmes carried out by the Higher Education Ministry, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), Khazanah and the Skills Development Fund Corporation involving 12,000 graduates.

He said this meant that out of the 20,000 unemployed graduates, 8,000 did not have the opportunity to undergo additional training to improve their marketability.

“Some of them come from the rural and interior areas as well as from low-income families.

“This background influences their character and self-confidence and affects their ability to secure employment

“Thus, by carrying out a last mile intervention in the form of finishing schools, I believe they will become more confident, and they are the target group of the SL1M,” he said, adding that the initiative was also for those who failed to be employed six months after graduating.