Digital economy provides wide employment opportunities - Fahmi

KUALA LUMPUR - Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil sees the Madani economy in the framework of digitalization as being able to create wide employment opportunities because it contains various sectors including programming, cyber security and e-commerce.

Fahmi said he expected between 500,000 job opportunities would definitely exist in one of those sectors because the development of technology now requires emphasis on all those aspects.

"I see one of the sectors that is currently small but will grow rapidly is cyber security, because it is useless if we have a vibrant but insecure digital economy and cyber security plays a very important role in the future.

"In addition, I also see that the e-commerce sector will continue to play an important role and those involved, whether working on such platforms or are actively involved in e-commerce business, may also create other job opportunities," he said in the programme ‘Special Narrative with Minister Fahmi Fadzil "Madani Economy: Digitalization Framework" on Radio Television Malaysia (RTM), last night.

Commenting further, Fahmi said that under the Ministry of Communications and Digital there are 911 functioning digital economy centres for entrepreneurs to get services and learn how to market their products.

"Through these platforms we see an increase in income of two to five times. So it's not just jobs that can be produced directly but our income can be increased in real time if we know the benefits of the digital economy and how we can get involved in the digital economy now," he said.

In the meantime, he said, one of the intentions of the Madani Economy emphasised by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is to emphasise on the concept of serialisation or downstreaming and thereby providing more skilled job opportunities.

"When we received a large investment such as this data processing centre and in fact this data processing centre has a large area and has a large building but the number of employees available is not many, maybe 20 to 30 people and the employees available are very technical and highly skilled.

"Therefore, I see that the digital economy sector is capable of playing that role in creating job opportunities for this country," he said. - BERNAMA