Many students in fields that don’t interest them

A job expert blames this on pressure from parents.

KUALA LUMPUR: At least one in three Malaysian students is pursuing a degree that doesn’t suit his personality or character traits, according to an international recruitment agency.

ManpowerGroup’s country manager for Malaysia, Sam Haggag, said one of the factors contributing to this phenomenon was pressure from parents.

“This is happening not only in Malaysia,” he said. “It’s a global issue. When I was growing up, my parents wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer because that was their perception of what a professional was.

“These young people are the same. They face pressure from parents who drive them towards certain professions that align with the family’s expectations.”

He told FMT he had encountered law graduates whose attention to detail was low but who were highly creative, a trait he would not associate with lawyers.

Haggag said the mismatch between character traits and paper qualifications was one of the main reasons that Malaysia had a high number of unemployed graduates.

At the same time, he said, some employers were unwilling to invest in these young graduates because they preferred ready-made talent at the lowest possible cost.

“Together, you have a recipe for disaster. And the poor person in the middle is the graduate who gets lambasted by everybody.”

According to the Malaysian Employers Federation, there were 200,000 unemployed graduates in the country in 2016. This number does not include those who have just completed their Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia or diploma and certificate programmes.

Some industry experts have blamed graduates’ “attitude problems” for their inability to secure employment, but Haggag said this was unfair.

“Are there graduates with an attitude problem? Yes. But there are experienced people with an attitude too.

“We have to ask ourselves: before these students went to the university, what type of career counselling did they get?

“How much preparation did they have in the academia to set them for the outside world? Academia is just that – it’s to prepare students for academic excellence. But they are poorly equipped with a perspective of the outside world, which is changing constantly.”

Unless something is done to help these graduates, he warned, Malaysia might continue to face a problem with unemployment, or fresh graduates might end up taking up to 18 months to find employment.

“Or their tenure may be short. This is because they simply have not been prepared for the harsh realities of the working environment.

“The more you align somebody’s job with the things he likes to do, the more likely you are to have success.” --FMT