Malaysia needs high-skilled talents post-pandemic
14 Jul 2021
The government is urged to look into building high-skilled talents for economic growth post-pandemic to ensure industries’ needs are matched with the talents produced from the education system.
Economic Action Council ED Prof Tan Sri Dr Noor Azlan Ghazali said lack of talent would spell doom for the country’s growth and productivity.
“We have to recognise that the severity of the problem we are facing now is not due to Covid-19. It was already there before the pandemic.
“We have been dealing with our inability to push for growth and for a strong transformation towards more high-skilled jobs.
“Besides that, there is also the issue of who benefits from the country’s growth, as we are aware that there are serious gaps in terms of who gets the benefits,” he said at the panel session of the Economic Summit 2021 held virtually yesterday.
Noor Azlan was one of the panellists at a session titled “Will Productivity and Growth Return After the Covid-19 Pandemic? How to Strengthen the Competitiveness of the Malaysian Economy in the New Normal?”
During the session, he pointed out that the way growth is created is very important to ensure that the benefits are distributed fairly across all categories of the Malaysian communities.
Hence, he called for the government to review the entirety of the education system from pre-school and primary school to secondary school, as well as university which are all extremely important.
“We really have to address this talent issue. Are we producing the right talents, and how are we keeping them in the country? The quality of talents we need would be very different, especially now and post-Covid-19.
“Covid-19 has really opened our eyes to the seriousness of our talent pool issue — the ability to digitise our economy, to embed technology and automation, as well as the influx of foreign workforce,” he added.
The one-day virtual summit was organised by KSI Strategic Institute for Asia Pacific.
Source: The Malaysian Reserve
