Apa lagi cerita graduan menganggur?

Baru-baru ini teman berbual dengan kawan lama satu sekolah dulu. Kami sebaya, bezanya dia sudah bekerjaya. Terlanjur berbual, teman bertanya pada dia, apa kurangnya graduan Melayu sehingga ramai sangat kes menganggur?

Dia jawab, "your CGPA is second thing! The prospective employer will look at your potential to boost their business. Your soft skill, critical thinking, interpersonal skill, confidence and your appearance. These are the first thing they will examine you..even your academic is excellent but without all of these criteria, you are useless."

Sim Kwang Yang pula mempunyai pandangannya tersendiri dalam artikel terbaru beliau:

Exactly how many recent graduates are unemployed is anybody’s guess. A minister’ announcement a few weeks ago put the figure at 57,000, with all kinds of qualifications attached to his statistics. Since numbers and figures are slippery entities in opaque Malaysia, we will simply rely on a broad stroke, and venture an educated guess that there are tens of thousands of graduates out of a job...

Exactly how many recent graduates are unemployed is anybody’s guess. A minister’ announcement a few weeks ago put the figure at 57,000, with all kinds of qualifications attached to his statistics. Since numbers and figures are slippery entities in opaque Malaysia, we will simply rely on a broad stroke, and venture an educated guess that there are tens of thousands of graduates out of a job.

Hoards of young Malaysians, having struggled through numerous examinations at various stages of their childhood and youth, suddenly discover that there is nothing but idle unemployment at the end of the rainbow.

The pressure from peers and parents for them to be gainfully employed must be frightening. The family has gone through great sacrifices to put them through school, and they are expected to contribute to the family coffer, now that they have come of age. Times are hard, and another income in the family would be desperately needed perhaps.

In any case, everybody is expected to cari makan. A steady good paying job is the hallmark of useful adulthood, and a stamp of respectability and independence. Prolonged unemployment must be causing havoc to the self-worth of these unemployed graduates.

The captains of industry and the HR heads of large corporations will no doubt throw their arms up in the air in exasperation, and complain that graduates nowadays are unemployable. It has something to do with the quality of graduates these days, they declare. They do not have the right skills, and they know little English, so essential in the world of trade and commerce these days.

They must be right in part, of course. The quality of our tertiary education has long been in decline. The honest academics know about this, and occasionally will whisper this piece of bad news to those who will lend an ear.

Poor professionals

One university head of department grumbled to me about having to grade students on a curve, and passing students who have no business in an institution of higher learning in the first place. Another complained about these students who cannot string a single English sentence together. Without English proficiency and therefore access to international journals and publications, they make poor professionals.

They may scream at the top of their voice, but their pleas for reform will not be heard. Politics has permeated the campuses through and through. The universities and colleges are first and foremost a powerful instrument of the state for social engineering towards the nebulous objectives of nation-building, and not crucial institutions for preparing youthful Malaysians for life.

More then three decades of the NEP and the National Language Policy must have taken their toll on the quality of university education. A career in the academia, both as a profession and a vocation, must have suffered. The ideal of the university as a community of scholars in search of and producing knowledge must be sacrificed for the sake of a political agenda designed by people who know next to nothing about education anyway. For one thing, meritocracy, and therefore the pursuit of excellence, has to be sidelined. That should tell you what “they” think about quality.

Like all things in the public domain in Malaysia, universities are also bureaucratised and standardised. This is done by the examination system. The skill that any university student would have mastered, more than any skill that is relevant to his area of expertise, is to pass exams. Learning by rote, with all the passivity of a sponge soaking up unrelated facts, must have taken away the students’ imagination, innovativeness and creativity nascent in every child. The curiosity and the life-long urge for discovery must have gone through rigor mortis by the time the student receives his graduation parchment.

When they find employment, is it any wonder they behave like robots, doing only what they are told, and badly? Are we to be surprised that employers find them poor at communication, problem-solving, taking pro-active actions, and offering solid forward-looking suggestions to improve their organisations?

Something is certainly not right with our tertiary education. Our universities and colleges, from the little contact that I have with them, feel almost like mere super secondary schools. You always get a small number of bright students at the top, the cream of the crop, and they would excel anywhere in the world. The average - ones they form the majority - really do not know much about the world, or about themselves. For one thing, they do not seem to read much, or even seem to be interested in reading in general.

The pegawai job

And of course they are choosy about their jobs. Why should they not be, having been told by parents and educators all through childhood and youth that indeed a university degree is a ticket to a good job? Perhaps, for Malay parents and students, having been reassured by the Big Brother through half a century of election rhetoric that the whole government policy is to lift the socio-economic status of the bumiputeras, is it too much to expect a juicy job as an unearned right?

You cannot blame the Umno politicians for not trying. The burgeoning bureaucracy in the government departments and agencies, and the various giant corporations that have links with the government either directly or indirectly, has absorbed these university graduates over past decades. But government revenue is always limited, and there must come a time when saturation means that massive absorption of new graduates is no longer feasible, without incurring serious economic consequences.

And that is the dilemma. Those graduating from the professional courses would probably still have no problem finding a job, even though the market conditions are such that they may not be as well paid as they have expected. For the bulk of those graduating from the social sciences, for instance, they are probably suitable only for cushy administrative work, pushing document, poring over forms, steeping in a sea of papers according to a whole kaleidoscope of rules and procedures.

Indeed, it is not an uncommon aspiration among Malay youths that all they want is a job as a pegawai, an official. A study has indicated that half the graduates interviewed expressed their interest to work for the government. When the door of the government is shut, they are pretty helpless. Thrust them into the dog-eat-dog world of the private sector, where merciless competition and pressure to deliver tabgible results rule the day, they would be stripped of their false sense of security and confidence. No wonder they find work in the private sector unsuitable!

It is just too easy to blame our young graduates for being choosy and not possessing the right skills in the work place. But it is not fair to them.

After all, they have been cast in rigid moulds for their entire life, shaped according to a prescribed educational philosophy, and thrust into a social and cultural strait-jacket from which their ability to think on their own feet can find no escape. They are the products of our system. They have become victims of our faulty simplistic educational values.

Then again, you must look at the demand side of the employment equation.

Employer's market

Despite the rosy picture painted by the available numbers of figures on our relatively robust growth rates, trade surpluses, relatively low inflation and unemployment rates, it still does not hide the fact that ours is a small open trade dependent economy, vulnerable to the vagaries of market forces in the world, and dominated by low or medium scale of industrial and commodity production. It is not an economy conducive to job creation in general.

Eventually, this has made it an employer’s market, with depressed wages and salaries being the norm, and stressful demand on long hours and multi-tasking. Training is not emphasised, because the employer expects high turnover in their staff anyway, and investment in training would have been wasted. In short, the market climate is not suitable towards job satisfaction for the employees. Can we blame them for switching jobs often?

Fortunately, we have a social system in which family support would be the anchor for the masses of unemployed graduates, to keep their body and soul together and alive, while mooning over their predicament of hanging in limbo for months or even for years on end. They will continue to send out hundreds of applications, with the hope of getting a few invitations for an interview. They will continue to walk away from interviews full of futile hope, and some may resort to seeking help from the numerous job agencies some of which will merely exploit them for quick profit.

The programme put into place by the government for these unemployed graduates to learn the art of employability, with a bit of pocket money on the side, is meant to stem out all possibilities of social discontent that may arise from prolonged unemployment. As usual, the colleges and institutions entrusted with this training programme will be the only beneficiary in this windfall of extra government expenditure.

The government need not have worried about social discontent though. These young people who have been programmed for life – like a computer – would have lost their ability to analyse the root cause of their pitiable plight. Worse still, being disciplined for so long in the various educational institutions, they would have lost their capacity for anger and rage.