Education for employment

By Violet Ooi

In this four-part series of articles, KiniBiz looks at the Malaysian education system’s capacity to produce employable graduates. Malaysian graduates have been branded as being lacking in employable skills and uncompetitive. The quality deficit in our human capital has many worried that a knowledge-based economy in 2020 would be an order too tall and ambitious to achieve. We then move along to investigate whether our teachers are academically inclined in the first place. Part three turns to the cause of vocational education. While the number of universities and colleges rises in Malaysia, its vocational education does not receive the attention that it deserves and many have overlooked the crucial roles it plays in taking the economy forward. Finally we look at how Malaysia still trails behind many countries in producing effective research. Lack of a well-defined career path for science graduates makes them turn to other jobs instead.