By Violet Ooi
Malaysian graduates have been branded as being lacking in employable skills and uncompetitive. The quality deficit in our human capital has made many worried that a knowledge-based economy in 2020 would be an order too tall and ambitious to achieve.
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In an age of globalisation powered by technological advancement, when ideas develop, rise and become obsolete, a country’s education system should evolve and adapt to the changing global trend.
Malaysia in its transformation from a former British colony to a developing nation had earlier recognised the critical role education plays. Malaysia’s rise to the upper middle income status among countries is in line with the improvement in literacy and education attainment as more schools are built and the number of graduates increases.
The growing number of schools and graduates however does not necessarily reflect the improvement of the quality of education especially in public education. Many, especially those from the upper middle class who increasingly enrol their children in private schools, now cast doubt over the quality of public education.
According to Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak in a recent Budget 2015 speech, it is estimated that “53,000 graduates remain unemployed after six months of graduating”.
Unemployed graduates
This is a worrying trend given that the rise of tertiary institutions in this country after all is meant to produce more graduates readily absorbed into the job market.
As such, the intrinsic problems lie within the nation’s education system which has largely failed to produce the kind of talents needed by the industries to take the economy forward.
Shamsuddin Bardan
Tertiary institutions especially public universities could not effectively prepare their graduates for the competitive job market. In an interview, managing director of the Malaysian Employers’ Federation (MEF) Shamsuddin Bardan emphasised the difference between public and private universities in term of focus and goals. Public universities tend to place great emphasis on teaching academic theories whereas private universities and colleges concentrate more on employability of students.
The rationale is clear: public universities aren’t concerned over the issue of funding; private universities on the other hand must build up their reputations or otherwise they would be short of business.
This however is not applicable to all public and private universities. With more than 400 tertiary institutions in the country spread across the spectrum of quality deliverance, it would be unfair to simply judge the universities based on funding, ownership and affiliations. For instance, there are a handful of public and private universities especially those newly established ones which carry poor reputations.
Setting aside the public-private universities’ differences, the (tertiary) education system as a whole is itself unsatisfactory.
Graduates’ inability to secure jobs is in great part due to the mismatch of skills required at the workplace.
Graduate employability
In a recent launch of a graduate employability programme, David Wong, the chairman of Outsourcing Malaysia, expressed the constant challenges faced by the shared services and outsourcing (SSO) industry as well as many companies across industries in hiring suitable graduates.
David Wong
“Which bring us to the realisation that there is a mismatch of the required skills, with the academic-preparedness and competency of the graduates who apply for the job, who mostly lack the necessary communication skills, creative and analytical problem solving capabilities,” said Wong.
To put it simply, our graduates, albeit highly educated in their respective fields, do not meet the requirements of the job market as they do not speak fluent English, hence the poor communication skills; they are also accustomed to the spoon-feeding culture in schools/colleges/universities, hence the inability to solve problems or being creative and analytical.
Anthony Raja Devadoss, the vice president of KellyOCG, an outsourcing and consulting group, put it very clearly that the skills needed for the job market should ideally be taught at institutions of higher learning or vocational schools.
“In the past five years, many new required skills have emerged. However, many of these much needed expertise have not been addressed at our local institutions of higher learning,” said Devadoss, who emphasised that much of expertise and knowledge is very much technology-driven. He cited the rise of social media which has resulted into skills needed to utilise and optimise these marketing and communications avenues.
Lack of critical thinking skills
Ong Kian Ming, a member of parliament for Serdang who was an academic in UCSI university, pointed out in an email interview that the major problem with our students is the lack of intellectual curiosity and the lack of critical thinking.
Ong Kian Ming
“Most of them (students) do not know much beyond (what) they have to study in universities even (if) they have access to much more information these days. Even if some of them are academically competent, the lack of critical thinking means that very few graduates can be considered self-starters that is to be able to take up a task or a challenge and run with it,” said Ong.
This is unacceptable in a nation which for so many years aspired to achieve a knowledge-based economy in line with Vision 2020. The education system is flawed and it is widely acknowledged that we have gone from one of the world’s best in the 70s to a fraction of what it used to be today.
The country’s young people moulded by that system have fallen victim to such inadequacies as bad teacher quality, inconsistency in medium of teaching science and mathematics, little emphasis on the English language and failure to incorporate syllabus/curriculum that could empower students with innovation and creativity. Our Asian society glorifies examinations; parents, teachers and even university lecturers fail to understand the importance of critical thinking and analytical skills.
Besides, lack of information and the failure to present a clear direction have caused many to make poor choices in pursuing higher education. On top of that, the poor quality in vocational and science education as well as scientific research is a further hindrance to developing the country’s human capital.
Tomorrow: Improving teaching quality
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