The Malaysian government and Google have announced two focused initiatives to equip Malaysian youth with future-ready skills focused on AI, and enhance public service delivery with the help of cloud-native, AI-driven productivity tools, in alignment with Malaysia’s MADANI Economy Framework.
The first initiative involves Google and the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) working together to upskill Malaysian youth from diverse backgrounds by providing 161 institutes of higher learning with 500 Google Career Certificate scholarships each. The second initiative involves equipping 445,000 public officers with Google Workspace tools to boost productivity across the public sector in collaboration with Jabatan Digital Negara (JDN), the government agency in charge of coordinating and implementing national and public sector digitalization projects under the Ministry of Digital.
These new initiatives it said are part of the strategic collaboration announced at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Meeting in San Francisco last year, led by Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim, Prime Minister of Malaysia, and Tengku Datuk Seri Utama Zafrul Aziz, Minister of Investment, Trade, and Industry. The collaboration is focused on four strategic areas to strengthen the country’s digital competitiveness: 1) advancing digital infrastructure investments to help companies expand online and overseas; 2) developing cloud-first policies for the AI economy; 3) making digital skills more accessible to Malaysians; and 4) accelerating secure and responsible AI adoption across the public and private sector.
In addition, Google Cloud has made data management, cybersecurity, and AI skills development training options accessible to working professionals through the Google Cloud Skills Boost program. This includes courses that are available at no cost, such as the Cloud Digital Leader Learning Path, the Introduction to Generative AI Learning Path, the Preparing for Your Professional Cloud Security Engineer Journey course, and the Preparing for your Professional Data Engineer Journey course, alongside gamified learning experiences via The Arcade.
Built on the industry’s leading cloud-native communication and collaboration platform, Google Workspace brings together the AI-powered applications used and loved by over three billion users—such as Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet, and more—into a single integrated workspace, with built-in enterprise-grade access management, device management, data protection, and data encryption, to help teams of all sizes connect, create, and collaborate from any device and any location.
