2006-2008 Studies on the Employability of UKM Graduates.
This paper discusses the employability of UKM graduates in the job market from 2006-2008. Studies showed that the employability varied from discipline to discipline with the dentistry and medical graduates leading the pack. In recent years UKM graduates have made inroads into GLC's, a positive development indeed. Introduction In an article published in a 2009 issue of the New Sunday Times, the Vice Chancellor of a Malaysian University was reported to be visibly upset when he learned that its graduates faced problems in getting gainful employment [1]. It can certainly be demoralising when graduates from other universities seem to be employers' poster boys. Taking cognizance of the fact, graduate employability has become a big social-education issue. Towards this end the Alumni Relations Office of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) has carried out studies on the employability of our graduates since 2006. This paper reports on the outcome of the studies and as expected they shed light on the employment prospects and the first jobs of our graduates. Methodology The studies were carried out in the month of August for the period 2006-2008. Graduands (would-be graduates) were given questionnaires (designed by the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia) to fill prior to their convocation days. From April to August every year, graduands are busy seeking employment or going for further studies. There were others who, after nearly five months had yet to find gainful employment. We have divided the status of the respondents into five categories namely (i) Gainfully employed (ii) Furthering studies (iii) Taking a course (iv) Waiting for job emplacement and (v) Unemployed. As can be seen from Table 1.1, the percentage of our graduate employability showed improvement since 2006. More than half had found gainful employment by the time they came for the Convocation in the years 2007 and 2008. This was very reassuring. The figures for those who were still unemployed saw a monotonic decrease from 48.25% in 2006 to 31.32% in 2007 and then to 27.70% in 2008. For those who continued to further their studies they were usually the ones with a higher CGPA and they aimed to work in universities as academics. In Malaysia one has to have a PhD in order to be employed as a university lecturer. In the 2007 sample for example, those who were still unemployed comprised 8.73% of graduates from the Faculty of Science and Technology (563 graduates), 6.76% of graduates of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (436 graduates) and 4.37% of graduates from the Faculty of Economics and Management (282 graduates). Medical and Dentistry graduates had the highest rate of employment, 88.8% and 97.4% respectively. Those medical or dentistry graduates who had not yet found employment by August 2007 were among those waiting to be emplaced. All of them would be employed eventually. Not so though even for the engineering graduates, only 59.6% of them managed to find employment by August. The corresponding figure for graduates from Allied Health Sciences was 59.8%. From the figures we can see that job prospects for graduates of different disciplines differed widely. The dentistry graduates were easily emplaced job-wise. Their relatively small number ensured that they did not flood the job market. Table 1.2 shows the employment sectors for the UKM graduates for the period studied. In the 2006 batch, only 28.3% of our graduates found employment in the government service. The figures climbed to 42.30% and 44.10% for 2007 and 2008 respectively. The figures for graduate employment in the statuetory bodies such as universities and local councils were quite consistent throughout the year, at around 6.5%. The percentage of UKM graduates in the multinational companies dropped from 22.46% in 2006 to 15.50% in 2007 and then to 14.30% in 2008. Similar drop was registered for the local private sector. For the first time, UKM graduates found gainful employment in the GLC's (Government-Linked Companies) such as Telekom and Petronas in 2008. …