• Memorandum of Understanding will provide internships and exchanges, R&D collaboration, alongside digitalization and Industry 4.0 support
• New agreement expands on 2016 MoU on internships

The Misk Foundation and Siemens Limited today signed a new Memorandum of Understanding at the Misk Global Forum greatly expanding their collaboration which is developing opportunities and empowering young people in Saudi Arabia.

The agreement will see the pursuit of three new initiatives covering; an R&D fellowship scheme that will send Saudi students to key Siemens’ R&D centres abroad; building capability within the Misk Academy, the foundation’s professional skills training institution, for courses in advanced “Industry 4.0” digitalization and automation solutions; and an expansion of the existing Misk- Siemens internships scheme to include Siemens operations in the US and the UK along with a fivefold increase in the number of participating students from Saudi Arabia.

The new MoU builds on the agreement signed at last year’s Misk Global Forum which led to the creation of an internship scheme to Siemens operations in Germany for young Saudis undergraduates.

In September, the first engineering students returned from Siemens internships organised as part of the initial Misk-Siemens MoU.

The students completed several assignments over the course of 10 weeks in Siemens’s Energy Management and Mobility divisions in Germany.

The students from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Alfaisal University, and King Saud University were mostly in their third and fourth years of bachelor degrees in industrial and electrical engineering. The next internship will be held in Germany in 2018.

Discussing the internship scheme, HE Al-Asaker said: “We have a simple but powerful mission at Misk: to empower Saudi youth so that they can become active participants in the knowledge economy. We achieve this in part through our focus on education with the Misk-Siemens Internship Program a leading programme in this programme of work.”

Misk and Siemens’ collaboration is in line with the Misk Foundation’s dedication to the empowerment of Saudi Arabian youth, the goals of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, which is transforming the Kingdom’s economy, and Siemen’s position as a global technology powerhouse, which has been present in Saudi Arabia for nearly a century.