"He has a master but didn't perform like one with master. Somebody (with lower degree) is better than him," quote a friend to the author. Is it necessary a person with Master degree been outplay by someone who just has a Bachelor degree? As for the author, it is not about whether one has higher academic qualification than the others, but why one wants to take higher qualification than what he/she had.
Bachelor degree is by far the most "basic" "high" qualification in the world. One may argue what about diploma or in case of Malaysia, STPM. But, noted that not all of the people study until they get a Bachelor degree. One may finish high school and then get a job. The lowest requirement for a job in Malaysia nowadays is indeed Malaysian Certificate of Education (SPM). In rare occasion, some may put PMR as the qualification but basically, one needs to have a SPM as minimum requirement for a job. For government sector, usually their grade will be 17 to 27. Higher than 27 then it required a diploma. For grade 41 and above, a degree is required. That is the case of government sector. Usually, one who has a degree will consider him/herself an executive.
Although that is the utopia case, no system is perfect. The quest for a job nowadays is very tough while the dogma still stay the same. People tend to see degree for a better place and so, parents start to push their children to get a higher education. University in Malaysia was added like "mushroom grew after the rain". Colleges become University; so on and so forth. Government also endorses people (especially the teenagers) to study hard to enter university. This end up people started to reach university massively but the job opportunities for the Bachelor degree's graduate are still the same. That is one reason why the country has unemployment issue and person who are usually associated with it are the graduate students. Consequently, those who have a Bachelor degree will end up applying for the lower job requirement such as (if it is in the contact of public sector) assistant officer; or maybe in the industrial environment, as a supervisor. In reallity these posts are meant for the lower academic qualification such as STPM/SPM or a diploma holder. Imagine that if one with a diploma who had started work way before a degree holder, than this fellow with just a diploma will be a "senior" for the same position compare to a degree holder!
The author personally engaged with this type of situation during a "career fair" where the person in charge of an organization encouraged graduates to apply for "assistant" position because for the officer post, it require a minimum three years experience. There comes the paradox, how can you expect a person for the appropriate post to be "with experience" where you denied the application from the inexperience one in the first place. That is why they end up keep opening the post for "officer" because the experience one will expect something better from the organization but because his/her entrance to organization was indeed starting over from the first stage, so he/she will fed up in a year or two and end up seeking another job that seem more promising.
So what do the people at the top of the hierarchy do? Well they obviously become at the top because they were the chosen one, so they started to say that graduate students do not have soft skill. Or the university courses do not cope with the industrial need. Or like that students do not have much extracurricular activities so they were "socially disconnected" – they lack of communication skills, or psychological skill, they do not know how to do the job at first glance! Or like one famously accuse by a head of a youth movement that, "education systems nowadays just producing photocopy machines as the students only memorize the fact from their notes and transfer it to the answer paper in examinations." Clearly, these geniuses are indicating that "graduates nowadays are not as good as us because we are far better from y'all when we graduated. We know to do our job the minutes we had our job. Nobody is telling us how to do the job because we knew how to do the job!"
While the main reason for this problem is not the graduates themselves per se but the capacity of position for their qualification that do not meet the deed. Imagine for one university, their graduate students (Bachelor degree) per year are approximately 3000. That is for one university. Multiply it by 18 public universities and you will get 54k. Those numbers do not include person who study at the private universities. Just for the sake of public university, do government jobs or industrial sector HAVE that much of positions for "executive level" to be given out? Or do the retirement or promotion rate for both sectors can cope with the "flooding" of graduates?
And then, the cycle move on. By the time graduates are so many, the higher position need to be filled by someone who have better than Bachelor degree. So they demand one who has Master. Soon, all people will be taking their Master because for the sake of job opportunity. Couple of years ago, there is just a few Master in a convocation. But nowadays, there are sixty to seventy students graduated Master per faculty. What next? Flooding of PhD students? Well maybe that won't be happening but it is clear that higher education is associated with higher position if we still stay with the job and degree dogma. That mean, maybe ten years from now, one who have a diploma will need to apply a SPM holder's job, while Bachelor degree's holder will end up applying the diploma's position.
That is why to manage graduate problems; it will take full responsibility for the person who made the policy to see through the eye of a bird to understand the situation at stake. For how long we need to condemn the younger if the problem is seen from the same older is better than younger perspective. Soon, the young will reach their old time and next condemn their young and so on. If we wish to solve a problem, do not tend to make a new one just to ignore the problems. Yes one soft skill maybe weak but if he increase his so called "soft skill" but the opportunity is narrowed, he maybe can't even work with his degree. After all, why does he need a degree when he doesn't use it?
Create more and more job opportunities than, so that graduates will be treat like graduates...
No comments:
Post a Comment