Motorola’s University of Western Australia facility is set to increase its number of employees to 100 as new projects come online.
Motorola’s University of Western Australia facility is set to increase its number of employees to 100 as new projects come online.
The news comes as the company announced 120 employees, about one third of its work force, would be made redundant over the next 12 months from its Adelaide software centre as part of a restructuring.
While about one thousand Motorola employees were dismissed worldwide there were no job losses at the company’s Perth and Sydney operations.
Motorola manager global software Australia Pat Eardley, who also heads Motorola’s Perth facility, said the company’s Perth operations were exceeding growth targets.
“Each year we’ve been working towards a number of target employees, and we’ve exceeded that,” he said.
Mr Eardley said Motorola’s Perth facility employed 69 staff, but that number would increase to 100 in the next two months.
“Certainly the ability to hire in WA has been absolutely staggering,” he said.
“We have not done a formal advertising campaign and we’ve already received 130 applications.”
Mr Eardley said while Motorola looked to hire graduates “we must have a very good balance of senior software engineers and we’ve hired from each of the public universities in Perth”.
“When hiring from universities, we have been hiring predominantly from Perth and the calibre of students at Perth universities is excellent,” he said.
Motorola’s facility at UWA was initially established as a 3D centre of excellence, however, with the completion of that work, the centre is now undertaking other projects.
One is a ‘Push to Talk’ project in collaboration with Telstra that involves developing ‘walkie talkie’ functionality using mobile phone technology for niche applications.
Another project is with Hong Kong’s police and emergency services where Motorola is developing a radio system for use in the field.
The system will improve communications, reduce the amount of police paper work and is expected to be operational in 12 to 14 months.
Motorola has also commenced a wireless project, in collaboration with UWA that addresses the issue of dry land salinity. It has committed $100,000 over three years to the project.
The company received $5.4 million over five years in State Government funding to establish the software engineering centre at UWA.
That equates to a subsidy of $27,000 for each of the 200 jobs Motorola expects to create.
