Employment as a journey or a destination? Interpreting graduates’ and employers’ perceptions – a Malaysia case study

Abstract

As human capital came to the fore in the discourse on economic growth, so too has the concepts of employment prospects and employability attributes as students transit to the labor market. This paper examines three issues in this transition in the context of Malaysia. These are, first, how important is employment prospects a consideration when students choose institutions to join and programs to pursue? Second, what is their understanding of the attributes needed for employability? Third, how well do students’ understanding of both concepts accord with how employers understand them? Using a combination of survey and face-to-face interviews, this study confirmed the considerable importance of both concepts in students’ study decisions. Their understanding was broadly congruent with that of employers. These findings have implications for students’ learning experiences, for the education system, and for policy-makers hoping for the human capital needed to make the leap from a middle-income to a high-income nation.

Keywords:

• employability
• employment prospects
• student perceptions
• education system
• human capital

Acknowledgements

We are also grateful to Dr Rozilini Fernandez-Chung for her stewardship of a research project on graduate employability from which the data set for this paper came.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The report of this study, in three volumes, was only published in 2009. Of relevance to this study is volume 3 (Nagaraj et al. 2009).

2 Even in the third survey, those who completed just secondary education made up 69% of the total (Nagaraj et al. 2009, 21).

3 A questionnaire was also administered to parents of students. The results of this survey are not reported here.

4 Global employability rankings exist. One example is the Times Higher Education’s Global Employability University Ranking, of which the 2014 release can be found in https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/global-employability-university-ranking-2014-results/2017406.article. In the Malaysia case, see Cheong et al. (forthcoming).

5 A study that links specific education institutions and study programs to employability is Galego and Saraiva (2010).

6 Given the unevenness of their English proficiency, local students tend to speak among themselves in their native tongues, dialects, or Mandarin outside the classroom.

7 In reporting readers’ views on Malaysian education in the Daily Express (“What the People Say” 2014), one reader blamed the system's emphasis on ‘Fact retention’ at the expense of thinking skills for the poor state of Malaysian education. Effandi and Zanaton (2007, 35) attributed this to ‘lecture-based and teacher-centered instruction.’

8 Indeed, the study of employers was Phase I of a study funded by the British Council of which the preset study of students is the second phase.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of University of Malaya’s High Impact Research Grant “Traditional knowledge: the Chinese in Malaysia: evolving identity in a globalizing environment and in nation building.” [UM.C/625/1/HIR/MOHE/ASH/04].