Youth unemployment comes under spotlight

KUALA LUMPUR: Government policies have led to too many graduates being churned out, leading to a high unemployment rate among graduates.
About 23% of total unemployed youths were graduates, according to Bank Negara Malaysia estimates in 2015. Youths represented more than half of total unemployed workers. Human Resource Minister Datuk Seri Richard Riot said that graduate unemployment in 2015 was at 273,600.
Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) board of trustee member Tan Sri Dr Anuwar Ali said the private sector mandate to provide higher education over the last two decades has resulted in an estimated enrolment of one million students both in public and private education sectors, of which about 80,000 are foreign students.
“Over the last two decades our economy has not grown as fast as before, in terms of employability of graduates,there is a problem as the level of absorptions in our various sectors, which is not as fast as the number of graduates enrolled ,” Anuwar said.
Fresh graduates he said are demanding salaries of more than RM2,500 to start with.
Anuwar said this is further fuelled by the country obtaining cheap labour from overseas, despite which the structural economy has not shown much of an improvement.
Echoing the same sentiments, MIER chairman Tan Sri Dr Sulaiman Mahbob said “as far as the structured economy is still concerned we are not producing economic growth that will generate quality employment.”
He said the focus should be directed towards the development of skills instead of churning out graduates with degrees, as the economy is very much dependent on the highly skilled intensive manufacturing sector which makes up about 30% of the gross domestic product (GDP).
“It is important to track quality investments which provides high quality and high skilled job opportunity for our graduates .We should focus more on skills training because this is what the industries want,” Sulaiman said adding that industries such as manufacturing are key for investments.
On top of that, he said the government should not extend the working age of employees, which is currently at 60, as this is impacting the younger workforce.
Professor Datuk Dr Mohamed Ariff , distinguished fellow of MIER, said Malaysia is undergoing a brain drain, and the weak ringgit has triggered “quality” fresh graduates to leave Malaysian shores to seek employment.
“While brain drain will be a good idea when we have a lot of unemployment here but the thing is our fresh grads are not of exports quality as they are not demanded there.The kind of people that are moving out are the better ones that doesn’t augur well for us,” he said.