The
Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) aims to make the local
construction industry more dynamic by encouraging more local builders to be
global players and having more skilled local construction workers as part of
efforts to develop a high income economy in Malaysia, says its newly appointed
Chief Executive Officer Datuk Seri Dr Judin Abdul Karim.
He said CIDB, a regulatory body and custodian
of the local construction industry formed in 1994, has identified and put in
place several initiatives to get the industry moving into higher gear.
They include getting local contractors and
workers to be better equipped and qualified to embrace new technologies so that
they can improve their delivery in terms of quality and time, thus reducing the
need for hiring millions of unskilled foreign workers.
At the same time, CIDB would also help effect
better payment mechanisms for contractors and sub-contractors through new
legislations, he told BERNAMA in an interview.
All these are part of efforts to make the
Malaysian construction industry one of the best in the world by 2015 and enable
more construction companies to have a more global outlook and vie for
international contracts instead of solely depending on local projects, he said.
To do this, CIDB has a number of challenges to
tackle. For a start, the construction industry is still very fragmented and
needs to improve, especially in the composition, quality and productivity of
the workforce.
Its workers, made up largely of foreign labor,
are mostly transient and move around a lot as they do not have permanent
employment. When certain projects are completed, they move to the next
construction site.
"Currently, the construction industry
uses 8 percent of the workforce but contributes to only about 3 percent of the
GDP (gross domestic product).
"We need to be more productive and we can
do this by becoming more mechanised," Dr Judin said, adding that there was
no need to do everything at construction sites as many components can be made
elsewhere in factories under better quality control conditions and subsequently
assembled at the sites.
Greater mechanisation would bring about
multifold benefits, including reducing the need for unskilled foreign workers,
equipping local workers with better skills to operate more sophisticated
construction machinery, he said.
Such knowledge can also come in handy when
local workers were employed by Malaysian firms vying for construction jobs
abroad, he said.
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