Curriculum Vis-A-Vis Market Demand

Meanwhile in Malaysia, the country's universities have been urged to work closely with the industry to make sure graduates churned by these institutions meet market demands. Quote, from Bernama, the Malaysian national news agency:

PEKAN, June 30 (Bernama) -- Universities must work closely with the industrial sector, including in co-curriculum development, to ensure their graduates are relevant to market demand, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said today.

The Deputy Prime Minister said the co-operation was crucial to avoid a gap between the graduates churned out by local universities and the industries' needs.

He said university co-curriculum must be compatible and relevant to the industrial sector's requirements.

Excuse me, co-curriculum, you say? But I thought the problem lies with the curriculum, not the co-curriculum, also sometimes known as extracurriculum.

Housekeeping Update

After sleeping on it for some hours last night, I decided this morning that I should limit the scope of this blog to the topics of "Employment Trend and Issues In South East Asia", which is still broad, but I think, at the moment, would be manageable.

So there will be categories about employment in Malaysia, in Singapore and in various other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Philippine, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.

Hmm... talk of Myanmar, this should be an interesting market to explore. We should know if anyone was interested to work in Myanmar.

Unemployable Graduates

There are a lot of jobs in the market, really. Recently I had a chance to flip through the recruitment pages of a major English newspaper in Singapore and, man, there were hundreds of jobs on offer.

Finance executive, finance manager, senior manager, human resource manager, analyst, business development manager, engineer, data management... the list is endless. I believe the situation is the same in Malaysia, yet I read in the news that there were some 60,000 university graduates who are unemployed.

There has been a prolonged debate as to why these graduates are unemployed when at the same time hundreds of openings in the private sector are practically screaming to be filled up, and I'm not talking about low-paying jobs which these graduates were supposedly "over-qualified".

Some argue that these university graduates, or leavers, were unable to find jobs because they were simply unemployable due to severe lack of skills and talent and knowledge, abetted by another fatal weakness -- a very, very poor command of English language, something far far worse than the way this blog is written.

Let's Talk About Jobs

Jobless? Desperate to find a job? Hey, I know how that feels. Been there, done the desperate things to find a job. One damn job. I did find one, that was in 1994 and I'm still working with the same organisation more than a decade later.

I'm not here to give you a job, by the way. This blog exists because maybe I can talk about jobs and career and share with you informations about job opportunities, if I ever come across one. Maybe we can even talk about serious stuff like employment trend in certain countries, employment figures and whatnots.

I shall endeavour to update this blog regularly talking about career and related stuff. You are welcome to share your views and thoughts either via the comment section or by e-mail. That's all for now.