Creating more high-income jobs

More than 3.3 million jobs will be vacant, of which over 60% will be in medium or high-income salary brackets to help turn Malaysia into a high-income nation will be created by 2020, according to Human Resource Minister Datuk Dr S. Subramaniam.

 

“At the same time, 600,000 people will move out of the lowest salary bracket and the number of people working in middle and high-income salary brackets will increase from 5.1 million to 9.2 million,” he forecast.

 

Dr Subramaniam said almost 50% of the additional jobs required vocational or diploma qualifications. “Therefore, more robust measures will be taken to transform our education system and worker training programmes that will position our labour force to meet the changing needs of the global economy. Today, only 28% of the workforces are in the highly-skilled category. This is not in line with a high-income economy that Malaysians aspire to achieve,” he said.

 

“We need continuous education, on-the-job training and re-skilling as well as multi-skilling to benefit from new technologies,” he added.

 

“Rewards in term of higher remuneration have not been in tandem with skills, achievements and merit,” Dr Subramaniam also noted.

 

He said Malaysia was committed to improving the skills of its workforce, increasing their income and reducing its dependency on foreign labour. This will see efforts to increase the per capita income from the current US$7,600 to US$15,000 by 2020, ensuring that economic development is sustained and managed in protecting the nation’s environment. [Rufaidah]