Industrial Visit MDEC
I have attended an industrial talk by Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), an government agency under Communications and Multimedia Malaysia (KKMM) , on 24/9/2018,Monday at 11.00a.m. The talk mainly focused on e-Rezeki and Global Online Work Force (GLOW). This event took approximately 2 hours to complete. The talk was attended by all first year students of School of Computing.
The event was presented in Bahasa Malaysia by Dr. Mohd Ihsanuddin Jamhari , who is a full time freelancer doing all sorts of jobs such as : - photography, ICT service&consultant, project manager, education, graphic designing. He has an electrical engineering degree from University Science Malaysia (USM). He is also an alumni of University Technology Malaysia (UTM) as he completed his Masters in UTM. Other than that, he is one of the Master Trainer for GLOW, since he is a full time freelancer, he is perfect as an GLOW trainer and also as the presenter for this event as this talk will mainly talk about freelancing.
Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) has launched 3 main programs to help us, the people of Malaysia - eUsahawan, eRezeki and Global Online Workforce (GLOW). All of these programs has the same goal - to help people of Malaysia to increase their income through internet/virtual platform. E-Rezeki and Global Online Workforce (GLOW) is actually the same as e-Rezeki was renamed into GLOW as it was abit unsuitable, but e-Rezeki was remained as it would confuse the older users therefore we can also say that GLOW is an improved version of e-Rezeki.
GLOW is a platform to sell skills, not to sell objects
According to MDEC, the main purpose of GLOW is to train, guide and nurture full time crowd workers so that they will be able to earn income digitally , potentially exceeding RM2,000 monthly. GLOW was established in order to : -
1.create a community for capable digital workers.
2.create a sustainable model for high impactful digital workers with involvement of partnerships of MDEC.
3.introduce freelancing as a alternative career for Malaysians through an digital global platform.
4.act as an support program for digital workers so that they’ll stay motivated and commited to find revenue digitally.
5.to advertise services&skills of Malaysians to the international market.
The program aims to generate fixed and stable digital income for Malaysia via crowdsourcing. Now, what is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is a method/process to earn income by getting work from a large group of people through online platforms.
I am very very interested to join this program. Why? It is because it will guide me and give me skills that will be very useful in the outside world after university. A degree is not everything but the skills I have will determine everything. The skills that I can learn through this program will also be a very important key for me to earn more income in the future, it can also help relief the financial burden on my parents as I am still unable to earn money myself and have to rely on my parents’ support.
In my opinion I think that e-Rezeki & GLOW is a very very interesting and beneficial program. Why? Because it can help people with financial problems, it doesn’t matter who be it students, house-maids or retirees, even war veterans! As long as one is determined to learn skills suitable to the market, one can be a freelancer and use GLOW / e-Rezeki as a platform to earn money. Students will be able to ease their burden on parents, house-maids will be able to earn incomes at home, retirees will have a side-income, war-veterans will be at ease. In my humble opinion, this program(GLOW) only brings huge positive impacts on our country and zero negatives!
Industrial Visit CICT
My goal/dreams with regard for my course (Data Engineering) is a simple one, yet hard to fulfill.
My dream is to be one of the pioneer Data Scientist Specialist in Malaysia and further improve Malaysian’s standard/skills in the IT department. In order to obtain that, first and foremost I have to prove myself worthy by attaining a first class degree here in UTM. I hope that this degree in UTM will be the perfect stepping stone for me to step into the wilderness, and potentially enable me to work overseas and gain more skills there. At the same time, earn an above average salary, and maybe in 10 years start my own start-up. As the current trend is towards the age of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), thus I believe that this goal of mine to have financial freedom should be reasonable and attainable.
There are a few things that I’ve learnt through this visit to CICT. First of all, it taught me what kinds of system that an IT-based company/facility uses, and some of the problems it faced. This might give me a head start when I’m trying to start my own start-up, in which I hope it will prevent me from doing some of the silliest, simplest and common mistakes for start-ups. Next, it also showed me how does an IT company/department set up its hierarchy, in other words, its organization structure. In a company, its hierarchy is very important thus learning about CICT’s organization structure will prepare me for the future and help me with my journey.
CICT also gives free software such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft 360 to its workers and students. This act gave me an important lesson – give important software which is costs money to own to workers for free. As this act will be able to improve the workers’ performance and it will be under the cost of the company. Also, the free software given such as the antivirus given recently, will be able to aid me in my studies during this 4 years. Yes, this visit to CICT has given me a huge impact.
In my humble opinion, there are quite a few actions that I can take in order to improve my potential in the data sector in this industry. First of all, I believe that it is necessary for me to learn multiple coding language such as C++, C# and also Python, especially Python as it is becoming more and more in-demand. These can be learnt through online learning platforms such as SoloLearn and Coder Bytes and also through YouTube.
Next, I can also attend some seminars held in UTM related to data, especially seminars given by Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) as they are usually very beneficial. Adding on, I can also do freelance work at the same time earn some side income and thus relieving some of the financial burden on my parents.
Industrial Visit CICT
The CIMB Group is a leading KL- based ASEAN universal bank, one of Asia's largest investment banks and one of the world's largest Islamic banks. As the fifth largest ASEAN banking group, they employ approximately 37,000 people in 15 countries throughout ASEAN, Asia and beyond. CIMB Investment Bank provides market-leading conventional and Islamic financial advice to provide our customers with tailor-made banking solutions. It has organized and carried out award - winning deals that demonstrate our ability to innovate and help their customers achieve their objectives. CIMB also has a large retail banking network of approximately 850 branches.
On 26th Oct, we had made a visit to the CIMB headquarters located at KL. We arrived approximately 3p.m. and was greeted by 3 beautiful workers to be our tour guides and immediately separated into 3 groups for ease of moving. We were brought to the 15th and 17th floor to see its beautiful quarters.
The first speaker introduced us what is CIMB and the internships that is available to us.
The next speaker is Mr. Ahmad Affzan bin Mokhtar Anuar (Director, Head of Production Support of CIMB). He talked about the system, securities of CIMB and also how CIMB handles its user’s privacy and data.
After that, came the Q&A session, whoever answered a question or asked a question was given a limited edition CIMB Touch’ n Go card. At the end of the session, we all took a picture together and were given CIMB recycling bags.
I felt that this visit gave us a lot – it assured us that choosing this course (SCSP) was the correct choice as it is in high demand, and even if you don’t want to be data engineer/data scientist, there are still other paths as a lot of the presenters were like that. They took their computer science degree into the financial industry and made it big. It also showed us what our computer science degree can bring us to in the future, which is extremely important for us students as we constantly worry that we made a wrong mistake. So, this visit gave us a huge boost in confidence and new hopes.
However, in order to achieve our goals, it isn’t that easy. We still need to improve ourselves by being proactive and gain more. This trip proved that what we learn in university is not enough to bring us to greater heights as it is only the bare minimum in the working world.
We can do much better if we proactively learn more through the internet as it is all on the tip of our fingers. We can join hackathons, learn Python and SQL ahead of time as this can greatly improve our potential in the industry and it’ll be easier on us academically. Other than that, we need to actively join curriculums as we need to learn soft skills as well. As they say, communication is the most important skill you can ever have. Networking is very important in the current world.
CIMB also showed us that they have internship programs which intrigued most of us as it provides us with free training and also rotation on different positions, by doing so we can learn different skillsets and also get new experience in a much shorter time compared to other interns. Needless to say, another important reason is that it provides allowance – RM1000 per month, which is very important for us which have no income yet.
Industrial Report ADAX
The current situation is that – organizations are progressively hoping to contract data analysts, demand has surpassed supply.
The Malaysian Advanced Economy Company (MDEC) knew this supply inadequacy would occur in 2015 when it initially begun chipping away at plans to help Malaysia as well as Southeast Asia address its approaching lack of information investigators.
MDEC's answer was the formation of the national huge information activity called ADAX (Asean Data Analytics eXchange) that was affirmed by the administration in 2016 with US$37.7 million (RM150 million) in financing spread more than four years. The financing originates from the national Human Resource Development Fund (HRDF) with the subsidizing program authoritatively called BDA Talent Development Grant.
On 26th Oct 2018, we (Data Engineering Students) had a visit to ADAX with its office located on the 27th floor of the Vertical Business Suites, we arrived early morning and was welcomed with good food for the whole day.
A visit to ADAX has given me a lot of information to think about my dreams for a while. It's not easy to become a data engineer, because it requires expertise especially in programming. It is because data scientists are trained to identify outstanding data in several ways. They make large data statistics, networks, routes, and methodologies for predictive fraud preference models and use them to create alerts that help ensure timely response when extraordinary data is recognized.
The action that I need to take is to improve the programming knowledge. This is because, ADAX has given two steps to become a data hero on our visit last week. First of all, I need to be proficient in probability & statistics. Next, I need to be proficient in programming. In addition, I must know and use the program to create coding like R-program and Python, especially Python as it is becoming more and more in-demand. These can be learnt through online learning platforms such as SoloLearn and Coder Bytes and also through YouTube
I'm interested to join GLOW program. This is because GLOW can give opportunity to students like us to use our skills to be serviced to all people around the world. GLOW is also able to generate income for students by simply becoming a “freelancer”. This program also can improve our soft skills to do work at a time, for example we can work while studying. GLOW also can give us an experience on how to face our clients and we manage to share our ideas to the clients. Furthermore, GLOW is one of the programs that we want to join it even though we know it is organized by MDEC.
NALI 2018
On 25 and 26 September 2018, New Academia Learning Innovation (NALI) held an symposium at Dewan Sultan Iskandar, UTM Johor Bahru from 8am to 5pm. We visited the symposium on the first day, 25th September on one of our lunch breaks. We went to Dewan Sultan Iskandar by walking. There is total of 101 booth with various ideas and gadgets on their booths. We took our time slowly to visit our assigned booths ( booth 1 to booth 6 ).
New Academia Learning Innovation (NALI), one of the largest exhibitions organized by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), UTM. NALI is created to upgrade learning by using today's technology. Next, various ideas have been introduced by university students as well as academics from all universities on how to improve the level of learning that is easier for students. The concept for NALI is to improve the quality of teaching and learning, and it will apply to students based on ideas that have been shared by all educators. NALI also is one of the platform to all educators to share their ideas and it is also to recognize NALI research and innovation products in teaching and learning through exhibition and competition.
We believe that this program will be very useful if it is conducted properly. We’ve visited booths multiple times only to find that it is empty every time. This program is also very useful if the systems/projects/items are implemented. It will bring huge changes into our current traditional education system, it might possible bring revolution to the system. It can also improve our country’s image if the students do well as students are our future leaders. In our point of view, we think that giving replications of real-world problems for students to solve is a very good idea as the students can gain more meaningful experience of their time in university as opposed to solving outdated problems in their course. We hope that most of the ideas in NALI will be implemented in order to improve our country. In conclusion, New Academia Learning Innovation (NALI) 2018 organized by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), UTM, is a poorly conducted event which diluted its usefulness and the meaning it brings to the table. If it is conducted properly it will be able to spread wonderful ideas on how to reform our current outdated education system. Schools and universities around the world should work together in order to bring ideas proposed in NALI to fruition.