Unable to land preferred jobs, engineering grads turn to food delivery
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AMIRUL Syaqir Anuar had dreams of becoming an aircraft engineer, and was willing to put in the work to earn a degree in the field.
But the paper qualification has not helped the 24-year-old realise his ambition. He is now one of the many engineering graduates navigating the roads as food deliverymen.
Amirul, who graduated from Universiti Kuala Lumpur in April, said job hunting left him disheartened.
“So, I’ve settled for work delivering for Foodpanda. Life must go on,” he told The Malaysian Insight.
Jobless graduates have been a problem in Malaysia for several years now. The problem persists despite efforts to get institutions of higher learning to work more closely with employers, to ensure graduates are taught skills that match industry needs.
An Education Ministry graduate tracer study last year said one in five of the 290,000 new graduates each year remained unemployed six months after graduation. These make up 55% of the country’s unemployed.
Within this group, graduates in the fields of engineering, manufacturing and construction are the second-largest cluster of the jobless, outnumbered only by their peers in the social sciences, business and law.
As of the year’s first quarter, the Statistics Department said there were 516,600 unemployed graduates.
Government job search portal JobsMalaysia, managed by the Human Resources Department, in July said 175,000 of the 240,000 job hunters on the site were fresh graduates.
But, many more like Amirul have lost the will to keep looking, and are reluctant to undergo retraining because they need to work and earn money now.
Like Amirul, 24-year-old Azham Azizi Jemmani is an aircraft engineering graduate, but he now works with a bank.
“I graduated last October, and applied for engineering jobs in Subang, Sepang and the Klang Valley, but couldn’t get anything. I’m just glad I got a job at the bank after five months of being unemployed.
A 26-year-old mechanical engineering graduate who would only give his name as Mohd Fuad now works as a salesman for a prominent gold jeweller.
“It wasn’t easy studying engineering. It takes several years just to get a degree.
“It’s not that I didn’t try, but it was very difficult to get a job in my field. After a while, you get fed up and just go for a different field.”
The reasons for graduate unemployment are varied. The common ones cited are skills mismatch and universities do not adequately prepare students for real jobs.
Khazanah Research Institute’s school-to-work transition survey last year said while education institutions emphasise academic and professional qualifications, employers prioritise soft skills and work experience.
The issue can be resolved if universities work more closely with industries, said former Universiti Teknologi Mara vice-chancellor Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar.
Sahol, now vice-chancellor at Crescent University in Chennai, India, said engineering graduates these days do not fulfil industry needs.
“They learn a lot of theory, about 60% theory. Very few of them have expertise in newer technology. Universities are not giving enough emphasis on the needs of industries.”
Lecturers who teach engineering might also lack industry experience and end up focusing on just theory, said Sahol, who supports a law compelling industries to provide training for graduates and pay them allowances as a solution.
A more complex reason is that the country is not creating enough high-skilled jobs to match the number of graduates entering the workforce.
Bank Negara Malaysia’s 2018 annual report, released earlier this year, said this had been the case from 2010 to 2017.
In that period, 173,457 diploma and degree holders entered the workforce annually, but only 98,514 high-skilled jobs were created each year on average.
Coupled with the competition of getting a job in the private sector, which snaps up only the cream of the crop, the situation leaves other graduates who may have performed satisfactorily in academic terms, but lack that extra edge, with little option but to settle for being food delivery riders. – September 20, 2019.