By Dr TARCISIUS CHIN 

First of a two-part article on leadership skills

WE are a rapidly developing economy with an average annual
growth rate of 7%. This development has created enormous wealth,
high incomes and favourable entrepreneurial and employment
opportunities for Malaysians. Indeed we are compelled to import
labour to man our economic activities.

Yet we have a relatively high level of unemployed graduates. We
have around 500,000 students in our institutions of higher
learning and can therefore expect more than 100,000 graduates
seeking employment each year. How employable they are is the
critical issue.

What employers look for

Feedback from employer groups including the Malaysian Employers
Federation, the Malaysian International Chamber of Commerce and
Industry, and JobStreet.com suggests that because of the
economic upswing it is increasingly difficult to recruit fresh
talent into the workforce. Employers have to hire foreign
labour, particularly in the construction and plantation sectors.

But they also cannot find enough suitable graduates for
executive and professional work, which is a paradox in view of
the large numbers of unemployed graduates. This raises the
question of our national competence to produce qualified people
for the job market and the corresponding challenge for our
universities and colleges to review curriculum design and
delivery strategies.

A key outcome of the recently convened Ninth Malaysian Education
Summit is that our graduates lack soft skills.

In the pursuit of an academic or professional qualification,
insufficient attention has been given to emotional and spiritual
development.

This has left graduates unprepared for the job market, which
demands soft skills in leadership, communication, interpersonal
relations, problem-solving initiative, English language
proficiency, confidence and other desirable personality
attributes.

The point was emphasised that we are now a global player and
therefore executive and professional competencies must match
international benchmarks, including the willingness and
flexibility of our graduates to work across cultures.

Education should be holistic and universities should not just be
degree mills.

Students should be comfortable with science and technology as
well as with the arts and the humanities.

They should be developed to think critically and creatively,
deliver and present their ideas analytically and clearly, relate
with others confidently and respectfully and imbibe noble values
of trust, hard work, discipline and accountability.

When the software of students is not developed to match their
hardware, graduates will find it difficult to respond to a job
market that is frequently changing, increasingly competitive,
global in orientation and demanding on commitments.

The proposal to retrain graduates to make them more suitable for
the job market is far less appealing than to demand that
universities do their job correctly in the first place, viz. to
produce people of substance.

At the executive level employers are particularly looking for
leadership potential so that recruits can rapidly move into high
gear to assume responsibilities and to contribute value to the
organisation.

And leadership demands high competence in self-management and
the ability to work in teams, which in turn requires the
interplay of many soft skills of communication, language
proficiency and interpersonal relations.

Effective leadership cannot be learned from books. It has to be
nurtured in environments that offer opportunities for learning
to work with others.

For too long we have had a forest of rhetoric on the need for
leadership development, but a desert of actual programmes to
develop our young people to be good, responsible and effective
leaders.

  
Dr Tarcisius Chin is a Fellow of the Malaysian Institute of
Management. The TRYLA 2005 programme is scheduled for May 12 to
May 20, 2005. Applications are now open for eligible young
Malaysians. For more information or to apply, contact MIM
Customer Service at 03- 2165 4611, e-mail enquiries@mim.edu or
visit www.mim.edu