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StudyMalaysia.com
& Smartmockups (Edited by SAYS)
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This Spotlight is sponsored by the Ministry of Higher Education.
One of these is the Graduates Reference Hub for Employment and Training (GREaT), a portal launched in September 2020, that makes it easier for graduates to find out about job offers, as well as other opportunities and programmes.
Since being marketable doesn’t just stop at finding a job, the one-stop portal also includes information on opportunities to continue studies, application for study-sponsorship, entrepreneurship programmes, as well as skills improvement trainings.
In 2020, the study found that Malaysian graduates had a marketability rate of 84.4%, compared to 86.2% in the previous year. To put things into perspective, a total of 40,550 respondents did not manage to find a job within six months after graduating.
While this slight dip is due to various reasons, including the effects of the pandemic on the workforce, it shows that there is a lot of work to be done to improve our graduates’ marketability.
MOHE collaborated with Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM), Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), and the Companies Commission of Malaysia (SSM) to come up with an all-new job matching feature on the GREaT portal.
How it works is that the Graduate Tracking Survey System (SKPG) database will identify graduates who have not yet found a job. Next, it will match these graduates with job vacancies in suitable companies or industries registered on the portal.
Not only is this feature helpful for unemployed graduates, it also makes it easier for employers to find the right talent seamlessly. For instance, through [email protected], companies can look for graduates according to their programmes and level of study, name of university, cumulative grade point average (CGPA), language skills, ICT skills, and more!
In fact, the [email protected] module will soon be expanded to apply to graduates who are underemployed, like a master’s holder whose job does not fully utilise his or her expertise. On top of that, the portal will also allow final year students to be matched with industrial training and apprenticeship programmes.
All in all, MOHE hopes that these combined efforts will help to increase the marketability of local graduates, thereby contributing to the economic development of the country.
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