WITHIN the sphere of modern education, the problem of skills gap has continuously emerged as a significant problem – one that is affecting individuals, employers, industries and the entire economy.
Graduates leave the education system with credentials but not with the required knowledge and work experience.
The main negative outcomes include unemployability and diminished job readiness. To address this, educational management must play a key role in closing the gap – by aligning academic learning with the demands of the labour market
The conventional education system must be held accountable for its failure to develop and regularly update curricula that align with current skill and qualification demands.
The problem with the educational curricula lies in their rigidity. Updating university courses requires navigating a lengthy bureaucratic approval process before any changes can be implemented.
As a result, educational curricula are typically not reviewed for several years, rendering them slow and often sluggish in their ability to change.
Meanwhile, the labour market is evolving at a rapid pace – driven largely by digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning and automation.
Graduates who have been trained in outdated curricula and are unfamiliar with the tools and techniques used in these sectors are struggling to find their place in the workforce.
For example, in the information technology sector in Malaysia, a student may graduate with a degree in programming, yet lack practical knowledge in high-demand areas such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or cybersecurity certifications – all of which are currently highly valued in the job market.
As a result, employers are often forced to spend more money in retraining graduates in essential skills while graduates themselves face reduced job prospects without further training and experience. This underscores the responsibility of educational management to ensure curricula remain flexible, relevant and regularly updated.
Ensuring curricula remain relevant to real-world demands requires a collaborative approach.
Educational management cannot operate in isolation. If institutions design courses that don’t align with the needs of the job market, those courses will hold little value in terms of employment outcomes.
Educational institutions must collaborate closely with employers, industry associations and policymakers to understand the skills sought in new graduates.
By establishing formal partnerships, educational management can ensure students gain relevant industry certifications as part of their learning experience.
Another example is cloud computing, a highly sought-after skill today, with certifications offered by companies like Amazon and Microsoft.
Educational management can integrate these certifications into undergraduate or postgraduate degree programmes by making them a graduation requirement.
Germany is known for its dual education system, where students spend one or two days working in the industry and the rest of the time in school or college.
This approach helps ensure that curricula remain closely aligned with industry needs, resulting in a much smaller gap between education and employment compared to other countries.
However, it is also the responsibility of educational management to equip students with hybrid skills – a combination of specialised technical expertise and essential soft skills such as leadership, communication, negotiation, problem-solving and analytical abilities.
A student can be highly proficient in programming languages, for example, but lack the soft skills needed to work effectively in cross-cultural teams. Employers widely acknowledge that soft skills are just as important – if not more so – than technical expertise.
Therefore, while educational management must ensure students gain the necessary technical skills, it should also embed soft skills development into the curriculum.
One effective approach is project-based learning, where students are assigned tasks that require them to demonstrate leadership, teamwork, negotiation, innovation and communication skills.
Singapore has a SkillsFuture policy, which is an excellent example of this type of educational policy.
Educational management also has a role in anticipating and proactively responding to future workforce requirements and trends. Rather than simply reacting to current skills shortages by updating curricula, it should proactively identify emerging sectors and fields and integrate them into educational programmes. This is where labour market analytics and foresight studies become essential tools.
The job market of tomorrow will be heavily influenced by emerging sectors such as renewable energy, fintech, biotechnology and other cutting-edge industries.
For instance, there is a huge opportunity for those who work in green energy and renewables – such as solar, wind and hydrogen – driven by the global push to transition to sustainable energy sources.
Educational management can and should include such subjects in the curricula today so that they have the skills and knowledge ready for jobs that may not even be fully developed yet.
The rapidly changing job market also requires educational management to encourage lifelong learning and retraining.
In the past, it was common for a student to graduate from university and go on to work in a single field for the rest of their life.
However, with the acceleration of technological change in recent decades, the life of the typical worker has been reduced to five to 10 years, meaning that the skills and qualifications they acquired at school or university are almost obsolete within a decade.
One way for educational management to address this is to create a flexible and seamless educational system that allows people to return to the university for further training and development.
Courses that have modular or stackable qualifications would be beneficial for the learners as well as employers.
For instance, a person working in marketing could take a micro-credential course on digital advertising and then, in a few years, take up another short course on data analytics and stack these onto a postgraduate certificate or diploma.
The increased competition in the job market as a result of globalisation also means that educational management should try to globalise the curricula to make them more in line with global standards.
A graduate will no longer be competing only for jobs in the local market but also in the global market. For instance, when multinational companies look to hire employees, they are looking for people with global skills. That means that graduates have to be prepared to work across cultures, adapt to changing technologies and collaborate remotely with teams and colleagues from other parts of the world.
Educational management can do this by incorporating international elements in their curricula, for instance, by studying cases from other countries, incorporating language learning into the course or facilitating foreign exchange and overseas internships.
Business management students in Malaysia, for example, can benefit from learning about European supply chain management while engineering students could look to Scandinavian countries for their approach to wind and solar power or Germany for their take on industrial strategy.
All of these have the effect of students being able to take the best of what other countries have to offer and adapt it to their own environments.
In conclusion, while there are many responsibilities, educational management needs to actively take on the role of bridging the gap between school and the workplace, as doing so has a range of important benefits.
Linking education and employment reduces the gap by making the curricula more relevant and up-to-date, incorporating hybrid skills, anticipating workforce requirements, encouraging lifelong learning and retraining, globalising the curriculum and digitalising the learning-teaching process, thereby creating a more future-ready workforce that will not just lead to more productive graduates but will also benefit the entire nation.
Prof Dr Akram Al-Khaled is from the Faculty of Management and Hospitality, Spectrum International University College.
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