Gurpardeep Singh, Vice President of Operations, APU (center) and Dennis Kwok, Vice President, Asia Pacific, CompTIA (second from left) launched the partnership at APU campus, Bukit Jalil, Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur, 9 July 2015: CompTIA, the information technology (IT) industry trade association, has welcomed Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) as its first CompTIA Authorized Academy Partner in Malaysia.
Gurpardeep Singh, Vice President, Operations, at APU and Dennis Kwok, Vice President, Asia Pacific, CompTIA, recently launched the partnership at the APU campus in Kuala Lumpur.
With this collaboration, APU students will be able to graduate with both an academic degree from APU and international standard and vendor neutral IT skills credentials from CompTIA.
“Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation is extremely delighted to become the first CompTIA Authorized Academy Partner in Malaysia,” said Gurpardeep. “We are always looking for ways to ensure our programmes continue to be at the leading edge of computing, so collaboration with CompTIA will further help in this objective. It is an excellent opportunity for APU students to get vendor-neutral IT education embedded in their curriculum through CompTIA.”
“APU is an important strategic partner for us because the university is at the forefront of improving workforce development, student employability and delivering long-term education value,” Kwok said. “Partnering with APU helps CompTIA fulfill one of its primary objectives – to prepare the IT workforce of today and tomorrow.”
The partnership between APU and CompTIA occurs at an opportune time.
According to CompTIA’s 2015 International Technology Adoption and Workforce Trends Study, 63 percent of Malaysian executives surveyed said they expected to increase IT staff headcount at their business this year.
Additionally, Malaysian companies planned to increase their IT spending, on average, by 6.7 percent in 2015.
“In the 21st Century workplace most skilled jobs depend on IT knowledge,” said Kwok. “Virtually all industries require IT professionals, and they are needed in large numbers.”
Professional certifications such as those awarded by CompTIA have an increasingly important placed in the hiring and promotion of IT workers. Hiring managers and HR professionals believe having IT job candidates with industry certifications saves time and resources in evaluating applicants, ensures a candidate’s credibility and demonstrates that they have a baseline set of knowledge. Once hired, certified IT professionals get up to speed more quickly, are more likely to stay with the company long term, have a higher likelihood of being promoted and generally perform better than non-certified IT staff.
