The Faculty of Engineering (FE), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) has organized an Industrial Advisory Panel Meeting 2020 program on 24th September 2020 at Sunway Putra Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. The program aimed to seek and incorporate experts’ comments and ideas from various fields of engineering and computing into the Engineering Education Curriculum at UTM, and to enhance the relationship between FE and industries.
In addition, the program also aimed to acquire up-to-date industry inputs that are relevant to the current industrial demands in engineering especially on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0). The input from the meeting would not only help to improve the academic curriculum at FE UTM, but also help in term of potential research collaborations, supports and funds, and maintain the FE program accreditations from EAC and MQA.
The program was launched by Tan Sri Abdul Halim Ali, Chairman of the UTM Board of Directors. In his opening keynote speech, he had emphasized the collaborations between academia and industry that have increasingly becoming a critical component of an efficient national innovation system.
Many Asian countries are facing problems in fostering such linkages. Malaysia is facing even greater barriers to such alliances, demanding innovative approaches to promoting university-industry collaborations.
He also mentioned that the world focus is now increasingly on assuring the quality of education outcomes and impacts towards government, community and industry. In particular, there is a growing interest in making sure that graduates emerge from higher education with the capabilities and competencies that will equip them not only to be ‘work ready’ for today but also ‘work ready plus’ for tomorrow.
The university and industry should play the role to help support and shape the vast majority of our society, political and change leaders, and create more social, cultural, technical, economic and environmental solutions for a sustainable future.
The outcomes from this meeting are to produce Industry-Led curriculums that would produce 21st-century graduates in engineering and computer science through flexible curriculum innovations, with the involvement of the industry partners. Besides, this meeting also encouraged industry network through industry involvement in organizing student career path programs, teaching & learning, and research & innovation.
Moreover, this industry linkage also gives benefits in terms of students’ internship placements or industry-led training which provides students with experience in solving real industry-based problems. This would also lead to future employment with the participating industry.
For this year, the meeting was attended by 64 Industry Advisory Panel (IAP) and 90 academicians, program managers of the faculty for 23 undergraduate (UG) programs and 50 postgraduate (PG) programs, involving six engineering and computing schools in UTM. The outcome of the meeting will help program managers to streamline the Program Learning Outcomes (PLO) of the academic programs by taking into account the needs of the current industry.