Najib’s 15%

ARCHIVES 2011

By admin-s On Apr 22, 2011

If hundreds of thousands of professionals leave Malaysia in this continuous trend within the next few years Vision2020 will never be achieved by 2020 and we will never ever be a developed country.

By Resident Wangsa Maju

‘Professionals’ are doctors, lawyers, accountants and other persons who undergo specialized training, usually belonging to an association which governs the quality of the vocation they practice. They are often regarded as highly educated and known as the ‘white-collared’ people. According to the Ministry of Human Resources (MHR) and Department of Statistics there were 65,321 job vacancies in the year 2010 with regards to the ‘professional’ category. If you think this number is not too big, think again. In 2004 there were only 5,187 registered vacancies. This makes it a 1300% increase from the years 2004 to 2010.

The trend is somewhat similar for technicians and associate professional vacancies registered with the MHR:

Kindly note assumptions number 1 to 3 at the bottom of this article whereby it is stated that private firms are not required to register unfilled positions with the MHR. It is correct to say this because private firms will normally recruit job positions on their own and not go through any government-linked agencies. Hence the actual number of unfilled positions in the Malaysian job market is higher than the MHR published statistics discussed here.

If we look at the snapshot of 2010 registered unfilled jobs, ‘elementary occupations’ hits the top spot. Such jobs are related to ‘pekerjaan asas’ such as maids, general workers, laborers and so on.

The run chart on ‘pekerjaan asas’ below shows that there’s a steep climb of exceeding 13000% (10 times more that professionals)from the years 2004 to 2010- caused by an acute shortage of workers in this area.

However the situation could have been worse. According to Tuan Haji Sabri, Deputy Director General of the Labor Department, in 2010, there were 785,000 Malaysians migrating out of the country and 1.8 million migrants into Malaysia. The 1.8 million migrants into Malaysia caught my eye because it appears that these migrants helped a little in easing the general worker shortage situation. The breakdown of the 1.8 million in 2010 is as follows:

On the 785,000 migrants out of Malaysia, my take is that they are mostly professionals or semi-professionals who have gone out of this country. I do not have enough statistical evidence to show this (not my fault because I rely on published statistics only and I don’t know why the Government has stopped releasing demographics like these since the year 2005) but being a professional myself who is in touch with the Asian region I am very confident that I am correct in saying that most the 785,000 migrants last year belonged to such a group and their reasons for migrating are push factors rather than pull factors. For me personally, it is a pain living in this country.