Republic Polytechnic and the Building Industry Consulting Service International (BICSI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) at the 11th BICSI South East Asia Conference 2013 held on RP’s campus. Signed on 25 Nov 2013, the MOU marks the beginning of a collaboration to train students towards an industry-recognized certification under BICSI’s Data Centre Design Consultancy (DCDC) during their three years in RP.
Building on its strength in engineering, RP launched the Diploma in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (DEEE) and enrolled its first cohort of DEEE students this year. In preparing students for the industry, RP worked alongside BICSI to develop a training and certification programme which will see a group of 15-20 top engineering students in the pioneer DEEE cohort trained under DCDC to further their IT competency and skills training as future data centre professionals.
Addressing the data centre growth and industry demands in Southeast Asia, President-Elect of BICSI Mr Michael A. Collins believes it is important to bring new participants into the industry. “After having gone through a curriculum that is as solid and robust as the BICSI curriculum being delivered by RP, these students will emerge 2-3 years ahead of their nearest competitors,” he said. “BICSI looks forward to the partnership and many more opportunities such as this.”
The MOU also includes equipping lecturers from RP to become trainers for the DCDC certification. By 2014, two of RP’s engineering lecturers will be certified as trainers ready to coach the first DEEE students under the data centre specialisation.
“This MOU we are signing today is the formal start of a journey that we know will meet the industry demand for data centre specialists,” said Mr Seto Lok Yin, Deputy Principal of RP. “Using this as a model, we will continue to include more industry-recognized qualifications into our curriculum so that we can better support the future manpower needs of many of the companies represented here.”
LanTroVision Operations Manager Mr Felix Chia, 33, feels that the initiative is highly beneficial to nurture data-competent students in learning new technology and standards. Said Mr Chia: “During my time, there were no courses targeting data centres. Seeing that we are going into a fast growing data era, this is definitely a good initiative to expose students to real world experience.”
