It appears that no matter what kind of upskilling and reskilling is being introduced, the locals are less likely to do the low entry levels of work. This explains why our youth (15 to 24 years old) unemployment rate is high.
– Anthony Dass, adjunct professor of UNITAR Malaysia
I have been noticing something really strange the last one year ever since we went back full force into working and hiring after the re-emergence from a two-year lockdown.
The workforce is not the same anymore. It has become drastically weakened – skill sets, attitudes, resilience, pro-activeness, toughness are all fast disappearing.
But the biggest question on all employers’ minds is “where are the people who were supposedly laid off or lost jobs during COVID?” Because we cannot find them.
There seems to be a dearth of candidates applying for jobs in almost any field, not necessarily mine.
I remember about 15 years ago, if I put a job recruitment advert out, I will have 30 people or more who will turn up for the interview … and that was during the GOOD times. But now we will have a sprinkling who will trickle through.
If the smaller number of potential candidates is not worrying enough, we also have to deal with the alarming retention rate and the ‘as resilient as candyfloss’ attitudes.
Many don’t see a company as a place to stay and contribute and grow with the company after sprouting some roots there. They see a company as a learning curve and they come in with an intention to ‘gain some experience’, ‘learn a bit’ and then sell themselves to the next highest bidder and so they last no more than six months to one year, and they gain nothing either as how much can you learn from that short period when it takes you four years to get a degree?
So a lot of them go on a merry-go-round of job hunting as a main job, while actually contributing and being someone to rely on becomes a secondary job. This is precisely why employers prefer to hire foreign employees on contracts – because they know for a fact that they get a full two years of value from an employee that they are paying for.
Foreign employees on contract don’t demand to work from home. They don’t disappear suddenly after collecting salaries, like a lot of Malaysians do. They also don’t do MC scams – I have a panel doctor who complains to me how ‘patients’ have yelled at her if she refuses to give fake MCs.
I have a question. Why has it become the company’s job to train people? Isn’t that the only job of the secondary and tertiary education institutions who get paid to do that? To provide people with the right attitude to serve and function for the salaries they are paid for and who hit the ground running when they are hired?
The irony is that job seekers pay universities to teach them to be valuable. But since that does not happen in most cases, they go out and expect companies to continue to teach them on basic fundamentals while paying them.
Why not remove universities and just let companies take in secondary school leavers and train them for jobs in their organisations for free for a year or two (so students save money) and then they can continue to work for the companies which trained them for a good salary?
I know if I train someone in my organisation for a year, I will pay them premium to continue working for me, because I have trained them to be exactly what I need. Or after a year, I will know they are not good for me, but then I can let them go with an accreditation that they have been trained for a year in a public relations and media house on everything they need to know and they will definitely get a job in any corporate communications office in any multinational company.
There is a difference between being thoroughly trained in real life scenarios, meeting real clients and dealing with working pressure, deadlines and timelines from the industry itself than learning archaic and mundane things in a university that does not prepare you at all for life in a corporate world.
It’s such a beneficial two way win-win. The industry gets to train people for free for a year for exactly what they need, and the students get trained for free in an industry that they want to excel in without needing to pay tuition fees.
It works just about anywhere. Engineering firms can teach engineering students, hospitals can teach medical students, law firms can teach law students, and so on.
Skills that don’t match with degrees will then become a thing of the past. Secondary and tertiary education do not teach both exact skill sets or the right attitude and confidence, which are all taught by the employer while paying people to do the job – so why do we need the middleman?
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
