M’sia needs to increase skilled workforce to 40%
Richard Riot Jaem says for the country to become a high-income nation, the skilled workforce will have to increase by another 12 per cent from the current 28 per cent.
KUCHING: At least 40 per cent of Malaysia’s workforce must be highly-skilled workers in order for the country to become a high-income nation, says the Human Resource Minister .
He said so far only 28 per cent of the Malaysian workforce were highly-skilled workers.
On realizing the gap which needed to be filled, he said the government under the 11th Malaysia Plan had set a target to increase the proportion of highly-skilled workers to 35 per cent by 2020.
“The percentage of highly-skilled workers in Malaysia is still low compared to other developed countries where the percentage of highly-skilled workers has exceeded 40 per cent.
“As such, the ministry is committed to development programmes to enhance the skills of the local workforce,” he said in a speech at the opening of the HR Summit 2016 Skills and Competencies seminar here yesterday.
Riot added that the government would continue to re-engineer education and skill training to ensure they were more relevant and integrated in producing more skilled workers.
Meanwhile, Riot said currently there were about 3.6 million foreign workers in the country, of whom only 1.9 million were legal workers.
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