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My wife & I arrived at PISA about 1pm. From the parking lot, I could see several stretches of cars parking surrounding PISA. I started to have the impression that the response to this expo will be relatively good but not as good as the response during the PC fair . Those who have been to PC fair in PISA will know what I mean.

Anyway, we managed to find a suitable parking slot in the basement. While we were walking towards the entrance, I started to see a crowd of people filling up a form. From far I saw it was a registration form, hence my wife walked towards the counter, grabbed 2 forms and diligently filled them up. To get into the main arena where the expo was held, we had to queue up and submitted the registration forms to some officers at the entrance. The officer verified our forms and gave us a VISITOR sticker to be pasted on our hand.

We walked into the arena and the 1^st booth we saw was Dell. It was strategically located straight in-front of the entrance. The booth was simple but yet elegant. For me, I could say Dell’s both attracted the most visitors, may be they are giving out free attractive bag and it could also be the list of vacancies available by them. Dell has manufacturing, sales & customer service activities in Penang. However, most of the job vacancies advertised on that day were into sales & customer service field, none for manufacturing.

Right behind Dell was Motorola. In Penang, Motorola is focusing on their communication devices (except handphone) manufacturing activities especially on walkie talkie. Even in Penang, Motorola has a well established R&D team focusing on walkie talkie technology development. Hence, most of the job vacancy is more into engineering (electronic, mechanical etc). Surprisingly even though the world economy is in recession now, but Motorola is still intensively hiring engineers. Even though it is weird to do so now, but Motorola Penang is actually expanding. This is because Motorola manufacturing site worldwide is consolidating their manufacturing into Penang. That is why Motorola Penang needs extra engineers to support their consolidation initiative.

Another major multinational participated in this expo was Intel. Surprising Intel still has some vacancies in their manufacturing, business & technology activities. In Malaysia, Intel has 2 huge manufacturing sites which are in Penang & Kulim, Kedah. Overall, it seems they are hiring but more on a selective hiring for critical vacancies or expansion initiative.

Other than that, there were also some local players such as Bank Negara, Petronas and etc. Bank Negara opened a relative big booth compared to the rest of the local players. They were not only looking for candidates to join them but they were also providing financial advice and tools during the expo. Petronas booth was relatively small if compared to their reputation as Malaysia’s sole petroleum company. Anyway, they have some job vacancies in their off shore plant and also some office work.

There were also some local universities and colleges took part in this expo. Their focus were more on promoting their post graduate programs. For those who missed visiting this expo, there will be another expo entirely focusing on postgraduate program on the 16 & 17-Dec at Gurney Hotel, Penang (9am – 5pm). I’m sure you will find some suitable programs if you are interested to further your studies.

We spent about 2 hours at the expo. My personal opinion, I’m still sceptical if all this companies are actually doing intensive hiring. However, I’m still glad and surprise to see there are still many job vacancies available in Penang.

As been widely announced, world leaders and business gurus are forecasting that in 2009, the world will be in another recession cycle but will recover as soon we are in 2010.  Even though the world is in recession now, but I’m sure each of these participated companies have their own human resource strategy.

So is this expo a success? It all depends on individual success (getting the job) and the companies strategy success (get the best employee at the right time). Please share your personal experience in the comment below if you are a visitor or a participant during the expo.

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Thanks

Regards

Yusoff