Find the RIGHT skills for Sustainable Productivity Growth & Competitiveness

Productivity & Competitiveness Insights 1/2022:

Find the RIGHT skills for Sustainable Productivity Growth & Competitiveness

by Dr. Shaik Roslinah Bux, Deputy Director,

Productivity & Competitiveness Development Division, MPC?

As we journey along the fifth month of 2022, there are much remedial works that need to be carried out or recalibrated to enable us to adapt and adopt to the New Normal way of living. We need to take cognisance that we must learn to live with the current pandemic situation and carry on with life the best possible way. One key issue is to revive and rejuvenate the vibrancy of our economy. It was reported that Malaysia’s unemployment rate improved to 4.3% in November 2021 from the recorded 5.3% in May 2020. However, there is one critical issue that has been beleaguering the nation for years: skills mismatch. The problem of mismatch between skills and jobs would impact job security, labour productivity and attractiveness to investors. The Socio-Economic Research Centre (SERC) highlighted that Malaysia’s labour productivity growth between 2016 and 2020 was merely 1.1%. This outcome was much lower than the projected labour productivity growth of 3.4% for the 12th Malaysia Plan (2021-2025). SERC shared that the skilled-related underemployment is at 37.7%, a rather high rate for people with tertiary education. Hence, the government is urged to focus on the perpetuating skill mismatch problem to ensure productive transformation and continuous job creation. The centre opined that Malaysians should not be highly dependent on semi-skilled and low-skilled workers if the country wants to expediate its transition into a high-income economy. Instead, four enabling factors be given due attention; namely, quality investment, technology adoption, digitalisation and high-skilled labour. We need to discard the hope of going back to pre-pandemic days. Malaysians are urged to strengthen our resiliency in the face of uneven recovery sectors and labour displacement by digital technology disruption. The uneven recovery contributed to the upward trend in unemployment for Malaysia while changing demands in the labour market worsened the issue of skills mismatch. In view of the challenging economic times, I wish to share a pertinent comment of Lee Heng Guie, the Executive-Director cum economist of SERC: “A person can be simultaneously overqualified and under skilled when the field of education does not correspond to the field of occupation.”. Food for thought!?

#MPC #MalaysiaProduktif #DrivingProductivityoftheNation