NETH and University Collaboration for Talent Workforce Development

The NEXTY Career Identity Program is NETH’s project for automotive software (SW) development industrial knowledge transfer to academia for future talent workforce development. The project’s objectives are to:

• Acquire talented workforce with the SW development skills needed to become a SW engineer.
• Build automotive SW development technology network between university and industry.
• Transfer automotive software development knowledge to universities.
• Develop automotive SW development curriculum for workforce upskilling.
• Define skill evaluation criteria for target technology in the embedded systems SW development field.

To transfer industrial knowledge to students, Model-Based Design and embedded SW development training related to Electrification was provided to them from November 2021 to November 2022. The challenge of project was to provide concrete SW development practices and examples with quality standard mindset while keeping in mind the various student majors and programming backgrounds. Imparting Model-Based Design philosophy is the key to successful training because NETH (also known as Toyota Tsusho NEXTY Electronics (Thailand) Co., Ltd.) uses Simulink^® for industrial SW development. With NETH’s university collaboration network and business partnership support, the NEXTY Career Identity Program provided training courses to 52 students, including basic Model-Based Design training, embedded systems workshop, DC motor modeling with FPGA hardware-in-the-loop, and battery management system using Stateflow^®. Eighteen professors from six universities joined the collaboration program, and nine of them plan to develop further curricula with NETH. These achievements show that our workforce development network is growing.