Are we equipping students with the right skills for the future? This question lingers in the mind of almost every educator, employer, parent and student today. Higher education institutions today encourage students to put their newly acquired skills to practice and even pick up real-world skills through initiatives like capstone and employer projects, career talks and leadership series.
INTI International University & Colleges has always been at the forefront of providing such opportunities to students.
Khim Tan, Group Chief Human Resource Officer of Alliance Bank (centre, top) was impressed with the resourcefulness demonstrated by students in finding open source developing tools during the entire project period.
“INTI has built close ties with numerous industry partners to develop employer projects that enable students to work on actual business case studies and industry-relevant problems. Through these projects, students are presented with immediate challenges faced by businesses and are required to work together in teams to develop and present their proposals within a given timeframe,” shared Dr Jane Lim, Chief Executive of INTI International College Subang, about the mechanics of an employer project.
She further elaborated, “The process enables our students to learn key employability skills, such as collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and communication, and equips them with practical experiences in meeting, managing and presenting before top management representatives from their ‘employer’ companies, thus, moulding them to become career-ready individuals.”
The INTI-Alliance collaboration is a unique and enriching experience for both up-and-coming young talents as well as leading industry experts.
“The employer project that INTI students embarked on with us recently is a great platform for students to taste the ‘real world’ and the opportunities and challenges faced in an employment market besides putting their academic learning to the test. These employer projects are a privilege to employers to tap into fresh ideas churned by young minds and perhaps earmark them for immediate or future hiring needs,” said Khim Tan, Group Chief Human Resource Officer of Alliance Bank.
Khim explained that one of her teams at Alliance Bank was able to leverage on the ideas of students as a proof of concept and retain the development work as foundation to building an actual working product in the future. Drawing on this outcome, she further explained that these collaborations would provide an employment pathway upon graduation for students as well as a talent pipeline for Alliance Bank especially for technology related roles in Management Trainee programmes.
Adding on about the employer project, Khim said, “I believe the students benefitted immensely from the coaching and mentoring provided by our representatives. On top of coaching, we ensured that students understand the nuances of the project. We kept track of the students’ progress, empowering them to plan and execute their strategies and ideas while challenging the status quo for further improvements or new ideations from them.”
Khim also acknowledged the enthusiasm students had towards the project.
“Throughout the project period, the students mirrored a high level of commitment and excellence. Given the nature and demands of the projects, students were expected to have thorough understanding of the project’s needs and act quickly on finding solutions for each project sprint, which they performed well. They exhibited a collaborative nature having successfully distributing their tasks equally to present solutions cohesively as a team,” said Khim.
Students presented their ideas and solutions virtually to representatives from Alliance Bank.
She was impressed by their resourcefulness in finding open source developing tools and acknowledged that such traits were important for their future careers.
She added, “Today, we see a shift from traditional to advance requirements among students. Employers look forward to specialised skills such as analytics, technology, robotics and even artificial intelligence compared to generic degrees. At INTI, students have access to micro-credentialed programmes such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), LGMS and SAS as it is embedded into their course structures. Leveraging on these expertise and recognitions, students gain industry-standard training whilst being exposed to the latest workforce trends.”
Khim is extremely grateful, citing the project as a wonderful learning journey alongside dedicated lecturers and students. She is also proud of the winning teams and hopes for an encore after they walked away with awards from the July 2020 IT Project Tradeshow.
Darel Low and Dexter Sia, currently pursuing the Bachelor of Computer Science programme at INTI International College Subang, were two of the students who participated in the initiative with Alliance Bank.
“Working with Alliance Bank provided me and my group mates an eye opening experience on the needs and wants of the banking industry. With an employer like Alliance Bank, we discovered that our learning outcomes in college such as the Agile Method is applicable in the industry. The future employment market anticipates students to be able to learn new technologies, adapt them and implement it in existing systems. Furthermore, we learnt that teamwork is an important element to move forward in a fast paced organization like Alliance Bank,” stated Darel Low who is also specializing in Software Engineering and Game & Mobile Development.
Adding to Darel’s opinion about the employer project, Dexter shared that employer projects like these increases student credibility, which will help them move up the career ladder in the future.
“Completing a degree programme alone is insufficient to land a job but if a student equips themselves with additional experiences on campus, they will further enhance skillsets that are important to survive in the rat race. Thanks to these experiences, INTI graduates can on average earn high first-job salaries in Malaysia, with 99% of them being employed within 6 months of graduating,” said Dexter.
Meanwhile, Dr Jane concluded, “Career readiness is a foundation from which to demonstrate core competencies for successes in the workplace and lifelong career management. For higher education, career readiness provides a framework for addressing career-related goals and outcomes of curricular and extracurricular activities, regardless of the student’s field of study. For employers, career readiness plays an important role in sourcing talent, providing a means of identifying key skills and abilities across all job functions; similarly, career readiness offers employers a framework for developing talent through internship and other experiential education programmes like INTI’s employer projects.”