Malaysia continues to set the benchmark for digital talent development for Southeast Asia as the highly coveted training programme for Apple’s Swift Programming Language is available to digital talents who want to learn how to create apps for Apple iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.
The training programme for Swift comes under the Selangor Technical Skills Development Centre — a platform that Selangor introduced recently and will expand as part of its newly announced Selangor Jobs & Skills Council initiative that comes under the Selangor Budget 2024 that had been tabled last week.
All digital talents based in Selangor who are already developing apps and want to learn the Swift programming language may sign up for the 18-day course at the Selangor Technical Skills Development Centre at Shah Alam. To-date, there have been various special-guest trainers and long-term coordinators who have worked Switft.
Interestingly, this isn’t Malaysia’s first long-term with Apple’s Swift. In 2020, Bernard Lim, a student from Lodge National Secondary School in Kuching, Sarawak, had been selected as one of the 350 winners to attend the Swift Playground at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference 2020 (WWDC20). The competition saw thousands of student developers from all over the world submitted their entries into the Swift Student Challenge.
The goal: Create an interactive scene in a Swift playground that can be experienced within three minutes.
Lim, who is very passionate about technology and coding, put together a Solar System model in Swift, incorporating UIKit, ARKit, SceneKit, AVFoundation, and Playground Support. “I want people to see and realise the beauty of our Solar System and the places beyond it, and envisages alien worlds humans could call home in the near future,” he shared during an interview with the New Straits Times.
Lim learned programming at 11 with HTML and only picked up Swift with Swift Playground on his Apple iPad in 2017. This became the start of his iOS coding journey and, with just three years of learning, he built his Swift Playground Student Challenge entry in three days.
It is clear that there is demand for learning how to code in Swift and Selangor wants to meet this growing interest. That is why it is one of the first states in Malaysia to put together a proper training course for this coding language.