Asia Pacific University (APU)’s annual flagship event, Mega Career Fair, returned with a bang after 2 years of interruption from the global pandemic. The one-day-only event saw thousands of visitors and job seekers throng the 120 booths set up on campus on 29th June 2022.

More than 400 recruiting personnel from top-level companies in 14 different industries participated in the major event including AirAsia, Maybank, Alliance Bank, Arvato Systems, Bank Islam, Bank Negara Malaysia, BDO, CIMB Bank, Coca-Cola, DHL, DKSH, Epson, Fusionex, Great Eastern, Habib Group, Hilti IT Services, Hong Leong Bank, Micron Memory, POS Malaysia, Public Bank, PwC, Schlumberger, Sun Life Malaysia, Tata Consultancy Services, Maxis, Deloitte, KPMG, Standard Chartered Bank and many more.

Apart from the large participating numbers, APU’s CEO Datuk Parmjit Singh highlighted during the opening of the career fair that there were over 6,400 job positions offered at the fair — 3,498 full-time positions and 3,000 internships.

“APU is considered to be a Professional Development Institution in keeping with its vision of ensuring that our students emerge as professionals and not merely graduate with a degree. You can be reasonably assured that the graduates of APU would be professionally guided with highly competency-based courses,” Datuk Parmjit told the brand leaders.

To boot, 50% of the participating companies were open to hiring international students. This boded well with the multicultural demographic at APU with an international student community of more than 13,000 students from more than 130 countries.

According to Prof. Dr. Ho Chin Kuan, APU’s Vice-Chancellor, the event was planned to ensure that both industry players and students gain the best experience and hospitality on campus.

“There was continuous engagement with both employers and students leading up the event to ensure that they received timely updates and knew exactly what to expect and more importantly, how they would be able to maximise the impact from attending the event,” he opined.

In fact, APU ensured that students who couldn’t attend the physical event were included by encouraging them to send their CVs to the organisers, which will then be made available to the participating companies. The fair received close to a thousand CVs from students as a result of the initiative.

In conjunction with the mega career fair, APU also launched the “Exclusive Partner Engagement Programme”, a unique model of collaboration where the university will assist employers in the key areas of Talent Acquisition, Upskilling and Retention.

The Executive Director of BDO Governance Advisory Sdn. Bhd., Sanjay Sidhu, praised APU for their efforts in preparing students and young professionals for the workforce. The 5th largest accounting firm in the world formalised its partnership with APU under the engagement programme during the event.

In fact, Sanjay was accompanied by his colleagues who were APU alumni — one who graduated with a BA (Hons) in Accounting and Finance specialising in Forensic Accounting and another with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science degree.

“They are two of my higher performers, two pillars of students that I am involved with. What I see in them is an absolute combination of ‘I can do’ and ‘I need to learn something new’ spirit — a desire for constant self-improvement,” Sanjay elaborated.

BDO Governance Advisory Sdn. Bhd. were on a hunt for potential candidates for the forensic unit, IT, and cybersecurity department. Apart from academic performance, Sanjay highlighted that the qualities he looked for in a candidate included attitude, enthusiasm, challenge seeker and innovative problem solving.

“I am satisfied with the talent search today. I have seen many very promising resumes, and I have spoken to very promising people. I am happy,” Sanjay winded up.

Notably, the event also welcomed new industry professionals to benefit from the experience. Syakirah Aisha, a human resources personnel from AceTeam Networks, an IT solutions provider, shared their first time with APU’s Mega Career Fair. “We didn’t expect the turnout would be so good. It was a very good experience. We are targeting to recruit four cloud engineers, two network security engineers, and we also have positions like product managers.”

Similarly, Vishnu Varthan, a personnel from Hilti Asia IT Services applauded APU for the turnout. “I think today's response in the career fair is a clear testimony to what APU students stand for and what you can see from them, the drive! Today's response shows that APU students want to drive their success throughout their campus career and also follow up with their actual careers.”

It’s also worth mentioning that there were jobs offered on the spot by employers like KPMG and Maybank where they recruited the suitable candidates who met the job requirement.

The positive feedback from employers was testament to the distinctive quality of APU’s students that has been a key differentiator for Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT) and then APU in the industry for the past 30 years since APIIT was established. This also reaffirmed the Institution’s consistently strong employability record over the years, including achieving 100% employability in the Tracer Study conducted by the Ministry of Higher Education.

Guaranteed employment for future graduates

Not only did the Mega Career Fair provide recruiters direct access to a large pool of talents, it was also a golden opportunity for APU graduates to showcase their skills and secure employment and internships.

“I have submitted my resume at the booths of Deloitte, Swift, Philip Capital, Schlumberger, and Finiro Capital Management because the jobs offered by these companies are relevant to my degree in International Business Management,” said Kizuna Kuramoto, an international student from Japan.

“I am interested in and looking for a cybersecurity job because it is my major, and today is my first step toward finding the job I want the most, conveniently at the campus,” said Snirnov Matrey from Kazakhstan.

That’s not all. The event even attracted undergraduates beyond APU. Students from Universiti Kuala Lumpur (UniKL) — Racheal Bingas, Siti Nabilah Mohd Noor and Norliana Akilah Mohammad Adam — believed that APU’s Mega Career Fair was a good opportunity to come and seek jobs after seeing an advertisement of the fair on APU’s Instagram page.

Summarising the outcome of APU Career Fair 2022, Prof. Dr. Ho shared, “It was very heartwarming to see many of our amazing alumni coming back to campus representing their companies to recruit our current graduates and students. We are delighted with the enthusiastic response that we received from employers.”

“Even more gratifying were the highly positive comments received from employers during and after the event regarding the quality of our students, the organisation of the event and the APU campus itself. We will plan to organise events such as this regularly in the future, just as we did before the pandemic,” he concluded.

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