This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on October 3, 2017

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Digital Economy Corp (MDEC) has launched a data science finishing school designed to fast-track the development of world-class data professionals who can meet the growing industries’ demands.

The public-private partnership, known as the Data Star programme, is being undertaken in collaboration with the Asean Data Analytics eXchange (Adax) and other key industry players.

MDEC chief executive officer Datuk Yasmin Mahmood said Data Star will help Malaysia achieve 20,000 data professionals by 2020, a goal set by the government in 2015.

“So far the country has produced 6,000 data professionals and we are confident that we will achieve 20,000 high-quality data professionals by 2020,” she said at the launch during the Big Data Week Asia 2017.

The Data Star programme is curated based on the Data Professional Skills Framework, a platform that supports data and analytics knowledge development with focus on three primary scopes; data engineer, data analyst and data scientist. Industry players involved in the programme include Kasatria, Fave, Tapway, Datalynx, Fusionex, GHL, Celcom, Leo Burnett and Quandatics.

Apart from Data Star, MDEC and Adax have worked together with universities in Malaysia in introducing data science courses to encourage students to become data science graduates.

Besides that, Adax offers a range of talent development programmes for professionals as it believes that data analytics is a critical skill set of the future.

“I can say with confidence that we now have enough industry players who are able to develop the different levels and different categories of data professionals.

“So now I feel that we have all of the ingredients to develop [data professionals], and now we are focusing on the awareness to make sure that people know where to go for data science,” said Yasmin.

Yasmin also called for government agencies and ministries as well as businesses from corporates to small and medium enterprises to adopt big data analytics (BDA) in their decision-making process to improve efficiency and accuracy.

“The value of data can be derived in multiple ways. Like MDEC, we are a government agency and we are now adopting BDA in all aspects as we are looking to become a data-driven organisation,” she said, noting that most decisions in MDEC are currently made based on data analytics through its internal platform.