At the Huawei Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Competition held at the Shangri-La Hote..
When I went to the ‘ICT Competition’ in Shenzhen, it was the ninth time this year that 210,000 people from more than 100 countries participated…1.3 million people visited and many of the winners deployed advanced research on high-tech technologies such as AI in Huawei
At the Huawei Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Competition held at the Shangri-La Hotel in Shenzhen, China on the afternoon of the 24th, cheers continued. Whenever the winning team in each category was called, voices of support for their country and universities erupted in the audience. All of the award-winning professors and students couldn’t control their joy or took the podium with emotional expressions.
“It was a good opportunity to learn a lot and develop digital capabilities in the problem-solving process,” said DLH Xiao Zhu team from Beijing University of Technology, which won the grand prize in the innovation category. Eighteen teams from nine major universities, including China, attended the ceremony.
Huawei’s ICT competition is the ninth this year. More than 210,000 professors and students from 2,000 universities in more than 100 countries and regions participated in this year’s ICT competition. It is the largest ever since the ICT competition began in 2015. Participating teams used technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data to solve problems in specific industries and introduce socially and business-worthy solutions.
Not all of the students who won the ICT competition will join Huawei after graduation, but many participants are choosing to implement Huawei. Tao Cheng Mian of Guilin Electronics Technology University in China, who won second place in the third ICT competition in 2018, is working as a technology manager after joining Huawei in 2022. In other words, ICT competitions involving talents from all over the world are playing a role as Huawei’s “talent pool” leading Chinese technology independence.
Huawei explained that it has fostered more than 1.3 million students by cooperating with 3,000 universities in more than 110 countries and regions through ICT competitions over the past decade. Furthermore, it announced that it plans to train more than 10 million ICT experts by 2030.
Huawei is putting a lot of effort into nurturing talent because the demand for technical manpower has been rapidly increasing in recent years. According to LinkedIn statistics as of 2023, recruitment demand for AI personnel has increased 323% over the past eight years. Earlier, the World Economic Forum also predicted that jobs related to AI and big data will increase by more than 60% from 2023 to 2027.
In this regard, Huawei’s senior vice president Robin Lu said in a welcoming speech at the competition ceremony, “The demand for ICT manpower is expected to reach 200 million by 2025, but 60 million of them are expected to be insufficient.” “It is time to focus on cultivating talented people with new productivity,” he stressed.
In addition, Huawei said that the ICT competition has grown into a major platform connecting industry, academia, and research. In fact, the Chinese Higher Education Association designated the 2021 ICT competition as a national competition, and from 2023, it was recognized as a key partner flagship program of the UNESCO ‘Global Technology Academy’. Huawei seems to be leading China’s high-tech talent training, including AI.
In addition, Huawei’s talent training program includes the “Genius Boy Project.” As a business to recruit the world’s best young talent with exceptional treatment, Huawei has been pushing for it in earnest since 2019. The main targets are master’s and doctoral-level talents in basic science and engineering fields such as mathematics, physics, and computer engineering. It does not consider conditions such as age and background.
Their annual salary reportedly amounts to 2 million yuan (about 400 million won). Considering that the average annual salary of Chinese private companies is 65,000 yuan (about 13 million won) as of 2022, it is about 30 times larger. In other words, they will not spare money in recruiting and fostering young talents. This is based on Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s “human resources management” philosophy.
Chairman Ren began to emphasize nurturing talent in late 2018 as the first U.S. Donald Trump administration increased the level of checks and pressure on Huawei. At the time, Chairman Ren emphasized the genius boy project and said, “Genius boys will dig into our organization like a loach and save Huawei.”
Chairman Ren also attended a forum in 2023 when he surprised the world by introducing his premium smartphone “Mate 60” developed with his own technology amid U.S. sanctions and said, “What Huawei stockpiles is not dollars, it is talent,” adding, “We will eventually have our own ‘human resources storage’.”
“It is always welcome for excellent talents to come to our company,” he said, adding, “We need to create the soil and environment for talented people to grow.”
Shenzhen correspondent Song Kwang-seop
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