KUALA LUMPUR – Aside from producing highly employable graduates, the Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) School of Engineering has placed a strong emphasis on producing workforce candidates who are adept with the growing needs of the fourth industrial revolution (IR 4.0).
As Malaysia sets its sights on becoming a high-income nation driven by IR 4.0 technology, the school has kept innovating the components of its courses in recent years to ensure they are up to date and relevant to industry demands.
Siva Kumar Sivanesan, the head of APU’s School of Engineering, said the school strives to provide cutting-edge and top-tier education delivery.
“We regularly consult with around three to four external panel members from the related industries to provide us with their specialised insight and advice, and to ensure our approach is always contemporary,” he told The Vibes when met recently.
“We also invite academics from other universities and from outside Malaysia to ensure our programmes meet gold standards.”
He said a Higher Education Ministry tracer study last year found that 100% of APU graduates were gainfully employed within six months of graduation.
Siva attributed the success rate to the recognition given to the school by both local and international bodies, apart from the appeal of its well-trained graduates to employers.
For the record, engineering degrees from APU are fully accredited by the Board of Engineers Malaysia, a body that is a signatory to the Washington Accord.
Currently, the school under Siva’s supervision offers five main programmes consisting of bachelor’s degrees in electrical and electronic engineering, telecommunications engineering, mechatronic engineering, computer engineering, and petroleum engineering, all of which come with honours.
Siva said this means that the graduates are able to be employed in countries that are signatories to the accord, such as Australia, Canada, China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more.
Some of the courses, such as the mechatronic engineering degree, also offer options for a dual degree programme from APU and the United Kingdom’s De Montfort University.
“Our students and graduates are very industry-compliant as we get plenty of requests for collaboration from the industry,” Siva said, adding that the school is home to some 20 state-of-the-art laboratories, which received heavy investment from APU.
“We incorporate student projects with the needs of the industry. For example, their final year projects are industry-relevant and purposely skewed towards research.”
Siva said some of these projects included a memorandum of understanding with companies and non-disclosure agreements as the final-year students were participating in real-world projects.
Global employability prospects
Siva – who has been an engineering academic for two decades – said students who attended the school would enjoy employability prospects at a global level.
He said this was partly due to the exposure of the students who come from different backgrounds and countries, as 60% of those enrolled come from outside Malaysia, especially from countries in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Siva also said some of APU’s engineering graduates were often found working in multinational corporations and other global industry giants. Many of the students, he noted, started their careers with highly competitive salaries.
Furthermore, he pointed to APU’s recent career fair, which attracted thousands of visitors and job seekers who vied for more than 6,400 jobs across a multitude of sectors, including engineering.
“Employability is a very important aspect of our education delivery, as education without employability would be considered a liability, but education with employability is an asset.
“We are very industry-focused and create a journey for our students, as we streamline and host career fairs with our job opportunity partners, for seamless integration of students getting a footing into the organisations.”
Harnessing IR 4.0 trends
Rapid advancements in technology have seen a variety of industry players double down on IR 4.0 trends over the past two to three years, seeing much focus drawn towards cloud computing, big data management, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the internet of things, among others.
Siva noted that the engineering courses at APU are highly relevant to this area even though the fields appear to be more related to information technology.
“We look into how machines are going to perform certain operations more effectively than humans. It is about things such as automation and sensory information picked up by devices, and dealing with huge amounts of data,” Siva explained.
“Many of our students are going in this direction.”
Meanwhile, Thang Ka Fei, APU’s senior head of its School of Technology, and formerly the head of APU’s School of Engineering, said the university’s computer engineering and mechatronics courses are at the centre of IR 4.0 in terms of students acquiring skills in this area.
“We are looking into the ability to design fully autonomous and intelligent smart systems and machinery, and their abilities to work with humans because the manned-machine interface is a big area in IR4.0 as well,” he said, adding that the engineering school has a fully integrated three-pronged approach to education.
“We are focused on giving students a good theoretical foundation so that they are problem solvers, and they have to have a very good theoretical understanding and foundation for them to develop solutions.
“Secondly, we focus a lot on practical hands-on skills. For each of the modules that we are teaching, there are hardware and software lab activities depending on the nature of the module.”
Thang also said students regularly perform simulations of real-world scenarios where engineers have to critically analyse and evaluate what could go wrong with a given design.
He added that the work-related skills are also acquired via group activities, where students are asked to make presentations during various stages of development.
“In all the case studies, they are able to train to think to solve real-world, complex engineering, which entails problems that have more than one solution.
“Our alumni often say that they are different from their peers (from other universities), whereby they found themselves to be more outspoken and adaptive because of the international student environment in APU.” – The Vibes, July 20, 2022
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