TVET is more than just providing money in the budget

 

From I Lourdesamy

The Madani government is making a major shift in educational focus to technical and vocational education and training (TVET) to support its economic strategies for growth and development and increase Bumiputera participation in the economy.

The government has allocated RM6.8 billion in the 2024 budget for TVET. Universiti Kuala Lumpur (UniKL) would be turned into the first TVET university in Malaysia.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced at the end of the 2024 Bumiputera economic congress that over the next five years, 100,000 TVET graduates would be trained in collaboration with government-linked and private companies.

The proposed plans in TVET sound good until we see the history of TVET in Malaysia and its dismal failure in the past.

TVET is not new. Even in the colonial period, there were “trade” schools in the country that provided vocational education and training to prepare students for employment.

In the 1960s, the government established more vocational schools supposedly to meet the demand for skilled workers in industry.

A study I did on the vocational schools in the 1970s showed that these schools were a failure in terms of their objective and mission. The graduates of these schools did not find ready employment in the industry.

From the inception, the vocational schools suffered from two problems. One was perception. The schools were seen as places for “failures” who could not make it in the main academic stream. This stigma has remained to the present time.

The countries that have succeeded in vocational education are those with a history of industrialisation, like Germany and, more recently, Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea. Malaysia does not have a similar history of industrialisation.

Our industries are generally small and fragmented. Whatever skilled workers needed are produced by the industries themselves through informal apprenticeships and on-the-job training. In this environment there is little need for any formal TVET. Our industries are too small to support a vibrant TVET, with good-paying jobs and career opportunities. This structural weakness has remained with us to the present time.

Students and parents know that the best-paying jobs are in the professions and services (white-collar jobs) and not in the blue-collar jobs in industries. Students are being realistic. Student preferences will continue to be for the professions and the services as long as the returns on education from industrial jobs remain low in comparative terms, with little prestige and career prospects.

Given the TVET history and the industry structure in Malaysia, the government has to be more realistic with its TVET plans and not jump on the TVET bandwagon with heavy investments.

Government vocational training in the past like “train and place” programmes were failures. Unless carefully planned and executed, TVET can turn out to be an expensive misadventure, with no or poor returns.

To succeed, TVET needs to be integrated with structural economic reforms and industrial policies. For example, having cheap foreign labour in our industries undermines the development of a robust TVET system.

The second problem with TVET from the beginning has been the mismatch between the training provider and the employing industry.

This is a mismatch between supply and demand, leading to the unemployability of vocational school graduates in the industry. Employers complain about the relevance and quality of vocational school graduates and that they have to retrain them to make them productive in the workplace.

The mismatch problem is the experience of many countries with TVET. Infosys in India recruits hundreds of engineering graduates every year from the leading engineering colleges. Infosys complains of the poor quality of the graduates and spends one whole year to retrain/ untrain them after recruitment to make them more relevant and productive. Many of the global companies do the same.

The fact is training providers can never produce trained workers. They can only produce “trainable” workers. It is the employer who needs to convert them into trained, skilled workers which many employers don’t want to do as it costs money. This is despite the government setting up Human Resource Development Corporation (HRDC) and the Human Resource Development Fund (HRDF) to give incentives to employers to provide training to their employees.

The solution to the mismatch problem is to build close, working linkages between the training provider and the industry. In Germany, for example, training is provided on a “sandwich” basis where the theory is provided by the training provider and the practice by the industry partner. In such a joint-venture training system, there is less room for mismatch to occur. What is trained will meet the relevance and quality requirements of the employer.

This collaboration and nexus between the training provider and the employing industry is difficult to establish and operate, especially if the training provider is the government, as is the case in Malaysia.

The government administrators bring a regulatory and control mindset to the collaboration that is not conducive to working with industry. Government and industry have different concepts of TVET and how it should be managed. Industry favours flexibility while government bureaucrats favour rigid control to protect what they consider as “quality”. They do not have an industrial mind.

The result is that often, such collaborations do not work or last. So, the mismatch between supply and demand continues.

An effective TVET requires quick decisions, programme changes in response to changes in technology and the employment market, flexible entries, exits, and re-entries, non-traditional deliveries and assessment metrics, opportunities for upgrading skill levels and knowledge for career progressions, and industry recognition.

The system must prepare for work in new and emerging industries, not just for present jobs that can become obsolete. TVET should provide micro-credential certifications for short, specialised courses which can be accumulated to qualify for a higher level skill certification.

All these require a paradigm shift in our concept and understanding of TVET. It is more than just providing money in the budget. - FMT

I Lourdesamy is a former deputy chief education officer of Penang and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.