To accord closely with Macao SAR Government’s “1+4” Appropriate Economic Diversification Development Plan and cultivate interdisciplinary talents needed by the city and the Greater Bay Area (GBA), Macao University of Tourism (UTM) integrates its own academic knowledge of the tourism industry with high-tech practitioners from the industry to pave the way for graduates' future development and opportunities.

Recently, 42 UTM undergraduate and postgraduate students have successfully gained the Alibaba Cloud Certificate Associate – Cloud Computing ACA certification. This is a professional certification in the information technology (IT) industry. In fact, UTM and Alibaba Cloud Academy have been piloting the "Alibaba Cloud Academic Empowerment Program (AAEP)" since 2021 with positive results. Under its new curriculum, UTM has officially implemented AAEP in IT-related courses in the 2023/2024 academic year.

With this, programmes at UTM have been effectively upgraded to an industry-standard level by offering valuable industry cloud computing resources over the fundamental IT knowledge. Each student is provided a complete set of cloud computing servers and a collection of learning resources on big data and artificial intelligence. Finally, each participating student has been arranged with an ACA examination.

UTM will continue to accord with the development plan of the SAR government and make good use of IT resources to cultivate and inspire more students to perform their talents for the development of Macao and the Greater Bay Area.