MAKING corporate Malaysia attractive   

The often-quoted reason is salary. The poor performance of our currency makes things expensive and the proposition of earning abroad more attractive.  

Salaries have remained stagnant for years, with the starting pay of a fresh graduate hovering between RM2,000 and RM2,500, just slightly up from the RM1,600 it was 20 years ago. 

Meanwhile, the costs of goods have skyrocketed, with a published inflation rate being an optimistic 3.4%, making our salary increments between 10 and 30% lower than inflation. 

Unfriendly policy towards unionisation, especially for graduates, and the focus of the law on unskilled workers have left somewhat of a lacuna in which fresh graduates are expected to be both skilled and lowly paid and somehow be grateful for employment itself. 

This may have worked two decades ago, but today’s young are better informed, prioritise different values, are more mobile and are willing to skip out altogether if their needs are not met.  

Many organisations are also stuck in an old top-down silo-based structure, unsuited to today’s new business realities that favour a linear approach, and while educational institutions have pivoted into more current, straight-to-the-point type of certifications, the roles in many organisations have remained focused on management-track, hierarchical type pyramids, despite the increasingly technocratic workforce that is reversing the pyramid.

“Specialist” employment and career tracks are few and far in between, and usually only found in multinationals or progressive companies seeking to mimic MNC best practises. 

This makes an already meagre-paying job that is unable to meet the present-day jobseeker’s social and philosophical needs, also unable to fit in their training!  

For Malaysia to lead, the government must 

While supply and demand are very much industry-driven, and the main driving force behind labour, the government needs to play a role to ensure continuity and adequacy of a skilled labour force to remain competitive regionally and globally. 

While Malaysian initiatives have centred around the usual – training a workforce via public institutes, luring back people who left, via agencies like TalentCorp, retraining retrenched workers through the likes of the Human Resources Development Foundation, and sporadic agencies promoting segments or industries, like the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre for start-ups or Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation for technology, there is no one single agency looking at Malaysian workforce as a whole, and perhaps one needs to be created, or extended from one of the present agencies. 

This agency should look at not only skilled, but semi-skilled and even casual/gig/menial jobs, and plan apportionments and employment mobility between them. It could also act as a point of engagement between the various agencies already in existence, serving each of these tasks, to coordinate their efforts and minimise overlaps and recreating the wheel. 

This would enable a strategic, holistic approach from school, to ensure a competent workforce across segments, keeping our employment numbers favourable, and even providing talent for other regional markets, enabling them to bring back know-how and expertise at a later date. This could be achieved on a government-to-government basis via worker exchange programmes, job matching, assisting in expatriation-repatriation arrangements and so on, to unlock the value chain of employment within and beyond our borders. 

This would enable us to leverage on areas we still lead in, such as certain manufacturing segments, low-cost airlines, medical tourism while also simultaneously identifying and even anticipating areas of rapid development and attempting to fill those gaps in a timely, even profitable manner. – August 24, 2022.

* Emmanuel Joseph firmly believes that Klang is the best place on Earth, and that motivated people can do far more good than any leader with motive.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.