Jobless young adults: Wake up to problem now
By: Alex (Laman M@RHAEN)
It is unfortunate that our education system has not prepared young Malaysians for the challenges of the globalisation. The system has failed to synchronise itself with the demands of the economy.The Malaysian version of the social engineering programme aspired to make a certain race more competitive in the job market and in turn forced universities to produce a certain number of graduates of a certain race each year. This policy had ruined the quality and the integrity of the universities.
Employers now cannot tell if a bumiputera graduate is really of quality or if he was just the lucky by-product of a quota system. The high number of unemployed local diploma and degree holders have lost their respect and rightful place in the job market.
Companies nowadays are not willing to spend that much money. Coupled with factors like globalisation, they realise that they need to be lean and competitive. But public universities are not doing enough to generate graduates with soft skills such effective communication and working environment interaction.
As it is, students in local universities often live within an insulated environment.
Overemphasis on knowledge economy skills has imparted negative values among unemployed graduates. It has cultivated a mindset with many of them view other jobs as demeaning. Many unemployed graduates choose to remain unemployed rather than work in a position that is less than ideal to them.
In the third quarter of 2003, the Human Resources Ministry created more jobs for foreigners than for its citizens. The Malaysian economy only created 30,000 job openings for Malaysian compared to about 720,000 formal sector jobs for foreigners.
The ministry always lauds its low (3.5 percent) unemployment rate and deceives the general with irrelevant statistics from the Labour Department. It ignores the fact that a majority of school leavers and unemployed graduates never register themselves with the department.
The ministry also conveniently ignores the fact that about 2.5 million Malaysians between the ages of 20 to 29 still remain a liability to their parents. They are jobless and depend on their parents for their livelihood and thus remain under the roof of the parents’ home. There are another 5.9 million school going (aged 10- 19) children who are fully dependent on their parents’ income to survive.
If steps are not taken now, Malaysia will face a serious problem in the future because of this trend of unemployed young adults depending on their parents’ income to survive.
Over a period of 10 years with three national general elections having come and gone and more than five foreign workers deportation exercises carried out, the Human Resources Ministry is still in the dark about the focus of a national labour policy and the labour environment in country.
The country’s economy is currently supported by five million workers in the private sector and 950,000 civil servants. There are about 3.7 million migrant workers.
It would be timely if the ministry together with the Economic Planning Unit start thinking about the very high number of unemployed young adults in the country, which will only increase each year.
The conversion of these unemployed into employed would generate billions in income revenue besides having positive multiplier effects on domestic economic activities. The effective deployment of this human capital asset would be a boon to the Malaysian economy.
Ignoring the unemployed youth issue would translate into the government having to deal with major social and economic problems in the years to come.
Alex - 21.05.2005 (M@RHAEN - Emel: marhaen@gmail.com / reformasi@gmail.com )
