Govt to absorb Unemployable Graduates

Don't worry, graduates. The government will employ you if nobody else would.

Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Najib Razak said yesterday there were 74,000 vacancies in the service, of which 30,000 were positions requiring a degree.

The Public Service Department and Public Services Commission will be instructed to expedite the hiring process as there were an estimated 60,000 graduates in different categories of unemployment, he added.

"If we can speed up recruitment, we can reduce the number of unemployed graduates, and also increase the efficiency of the civil service," Najib said at a Press conference after chairing the first meeting of a special committee formed to address the problem of unemployed graduates.

Dear Najib, I am amused by your statement that speeding up recruitment will help increase the efficiency of the civil service. It surely will help reduce the number of unemployed graduates, but increase of efficiency???? are you sure????

"When we say there are 60,000 unemployed graduates, we must be careful to note that these are as yet unrefined figures. They comprise these different categories of graduates," Najib said.

It looks like the figure is much more???

Najib said about 70 per cent of unemployed graduates were Bumiputeras and females.

Weak command of English and poor communication skills were acknowledged as the main reason for graduates’ unemployability and the Education and Higher Education ministries are to address this through reviews of the school and university curriculum.

How to review, dear Najib? There are numerous questions to be answered. Firstly, many of the teachers themselves are so weak in English. Secondly, if the syllabus are to be strengthened and the curriculum expanded, then, Bahasa Malaysia will have to give way to English in more subjects other than Maths and science, and already there are so much hue and cry over the conversion of Maths and Science to English. Apart from that, these two subjects are till today being taught in Bahasa, even in Universities, after the conversion.

Read this article:Lecturers still using Bahasa.

Several public universities have not fully implemented the Government’s policy on all Maths and Science-based degree programmes to be taught in English because not all staff and students are ready for a 100% switch.

Two of the universities said that they had no choice but to implement the directive gradually. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia vice-chancellor Prof Datuk Mohd Salleh Mohd Yasin said that because of various constraints, implementation would be gradual.

It was never going to be entirely in English from the beginning as our students come from various backgrounds.”

Universiti Putra Malaysia vice-chancellor Prof Dr Nik Mustapha Raja Abdullah expressed similar sentiments. According to several undergraduates in UPM, UKM and Universiti Malaya, lectures are still being conducted in Bahasa Malaysia.

The students claimed that some lecturers’ English is so weak that what they say is practically incomprehensible, so students have asked them to teach in the national language instead.

The policy to teach Maths and Science in English was implemented in 2003 for Year One, Form One and Lower Six students.

A first-year engineering student in UKM said although he was into his second semester, many lecturers had yet to follow the ruling. “Most of my lecturers are still using Bahasa as the medium of instruction,” he said.

At the start of the first semester, students had asked two lecturers to teach in English, but their command of the language was so poor that the students implored them to revert to Bahasa. “We couldn’t understand half of what they said,” a student said.

A second-year engineering student in UPM said that from this semester, all the notes were in English. But they were still using both Bahasa and English in lectures, he added.