ICT industry faces multipronged challenges: Pikom

By Edwin Yapp July 7, 2014

Addressing challenges

Asked what can be done about the other two major challenges, namely the decline of the supply of graduates and the employability of local graduates, both Pikom officials conceded that they are serious and difficult, and will take time to overcome.

With regard to the lack of enrolment issue, Woon argued that today’s computer science disciplines are perhaps too generic with no differentiating factors between them.

“There are those who create technology, which has to do more with computer science and software engineering, and others who use IT to support their organisations, what some call ‘expert users.’

“Often employers cannot distinguish between skill sets of a computer scientist or a software engineer and these ‘information systems expert users’, he argued. “We are creating these different categories in the hope that employers can distinguish between the two so that the industry can recognise the different skill sets.”

ICT industry faces multipronged challenges: Pikom: Page 2 of 2 Muhammad Imran Kunalan Abdullah (pic), director of talent division, MDeC, said another initiative the national ICT custodian has embarked on to address the supply deficiency is to create better awareness through its strategic initiative dubbed ‘ICT as a Career Choice.’

Speaking at the same media briefing, Imran said one of the biggest challenges [on the supply side] faced today has to do with parents’ perception of what a computer science or ICT career is all about.

“If you look at the present environment, kids seem to be tech savvy and expert users of gadgets, but when you ask them if they are serious enough to pursue ICT as a career and become a creator of technology, they decline.

“Also, with parents, the stigma of the dotcom bust is still there, and they may not encourage their children to pursue ICT as a career,” he argued.

Imran said the ICT as a Career Choice programme is designed to permeate all schools – both primary and secondary – in a bid to raise the awareness of what ICT as a career could truly be.

“We have to address this at the school level as it’s too late for those already enrolled [in other courses] at universities. To this end, we have created a career counselling kit to help teachers, especially school career counsellors, to advise students. This involves organising boot camps to ensure they have the right information,” he added.

Imran also revealed that Pikom and MDeC are working closely with the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) and the Association for Computing Machinery in a bid to streamline the curriculum and ensure that the industry’s expectation of fresh ICT graduates are met. Currently, Pikom government affairs committee, headed by Dr Dzaharudin Mansor is coordinating these inititatives on behalf of Pikom.

“Universities struggle to refresh the curriculum fast enough as technology progresses too rapidly. This is where MDeC, Pikom and the industry can help by embedding ourselves into University curriculum boards to ensure they are up to speed,” he said.

Besides the concern of the employability of fresh graduates, there are also worries for graduate ICT professionals as demand for fresh graduates only constitute some 35% of the total ICT professional in demand.

“There is a need to ensure continuing certification for graduate ICT professionals and this is where initiatives like the MyProCert can help,” Imran added.

Other findings

Meanwhile, Pikom’s ICT Job Market Outlook report also revealed that the gap is widening between lower and higher end job categories; from 2.75 times in 2011 to 2.83 times in 2012 and 2.92 times in 2013, while the salary growth for fresh graduates stands at 4.6% in 2013.

Also, there is no significant difference in average salary between ICT Vendor and ICT end-user industries, except in the middle management where the difference is 11%.

However, the salary in the managerial category still tends to record higher than in engineering/ technical lines. For example, IT Project managers earned an average salary of RM8,947 or 28.6% higher than senior IT engineer at RM6,956.

Another key finding is that salary spreads between junior and senior positions continue to expand and that there is a big jump is apparent. Executives with one to four years, earn a median salary of RM3,069 while those with five to nine years’ experience come in at RM5,426 (click chart above to enlarge).

Companies with employment size in excess of 2,000 paid an average salary of RM6,705, which is 1.88 times more than companies with size less than 10 persons, coming in at RM3,776 only.

Finally, the ‘hot’ ICT jobs are driven by the growing demand for big data analytics requiring inter-disciplinary skills in IT, numerical, statistical and business intelligence skills, and IT security continues to be in demand, driven by proliferations of cyber security incidents.

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