KUCHING, July 11: The Malaysian Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) has allocated a total of RM70 million to implement programmes in order to help the industry players affected by Covid-19 pandemic to improve their capability and capacity.
Senior Minister (Works) Datuk Seri Fadillah Yusof said this was also in line with the country’s policy in improving the usage of technology, reducing the number of foreign workers, and at the same time providing job opportunities for the local.
“The programme, which will be prepared and implemented this year, would provide exposure and also train some 30,000 industry players, namely the contractors, construction personnel, and the youth, in various areas of skills, supervision and management as well as the use of technology in construction.
“About 17,000 of the local construction personnel and youth will benefit from this Skilling, Reskilling, Upskilling, as well as the accreditation of skills that will be implemented in the programs, and this efforts would help to improve the local personnel and youth skills in the high impact fields in order to build a career in the construction industry, thus, reducing the dependence on foreign labors,” he said in a press statement today.
Fadillah added that CIDB will also provide an apprenticeship program, whereby a total of 7,800 local youth will be given the opportunity to be placed in a construction companies for training purpose and also gaining experiences in the construction industry.
Apart from skills training programmes for the personnel and youth, he noted, CIDB also come out with few other initiative to improve the usage of technology among contractors.
He said CIDB plan to produce Industrial Building System (IBS) components and facilitate the local contractors to switch from conventional systems to IBS, and CIDB also provides subsidies for Building Information Modeling (BIM) software purchases that can be utilised by the industry players, in order to improve the software usage,” he added.
“CIDB also have also developed Contractor4U, a mobile application that would make it easier for users and homeowners to search and obtain services of local small contractors.
“The registration for the apps are open to all contractors, especially from the G1 and G3 group, and a total of 4,500 contractors has registered with the application as of now.
“All this is an additional allocation to the CIDB Prihatin package worth RM9 million which was announced on May 7, during the Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO),” he added.—DayakDaily.
