With the advent of Industry 4.0, future workspaces are expected to evolve in tandem with technological advances in industry and education. Industry 4.0 calls for transformation and effective talent development is vital in ensuring national aspirations are achieved while eliminating redundancy and ensuring consistency. As such, this study aims to understand the impact of Industry 4.0 on computer engineering-related workforce and skills development within Multinational Companies (MNCs) to Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. In this study, online questionnaires were distributed to evaluate the current and future hiring trends. The study reveals that most of the employees have positive perceptions about the industrial current practice on Industry 4.0 and identified the prospective demands on the professions that will be affected. Five significant areas of required competencies found in this study are adaptability, soft skills, software engineering, data analytics, and technical skills. The findings provide empirical evidence about current and future employment scenarios in Malaysia concerning the possible impact of Industry 4.0 on the companies and issues involved in managing the transition to Industry 4.0. Besides, the emergent skills required by workforces that are previously unaddressed in the literature were identified. Empirical evidence from the analysis contributes to shaping the educational systems of the future and helps to proactively identify specific skills shortages at an early stage.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.