SARAWAK under Premier Tan Sri Abang Johari Openg has grand development plans. A bevy of infrastructure projects are being undertaken and not just the federal-funded Pan-Borneo Highway which has reached the stage of the Sarawak and Sabah links, via and bypassing Brunei.
In addition, the state government is funding its own network of coastal roads and bridges crisscrossing the state. Ports and airports are to be upgraded, including plans for a new deep-sea port and international airport for Kuching.
All these to prepare the state for new industries and agriculture production, a push to become a new and renewable energy powerhouse as well as to further develop new oil and gas fields.
These plans, however, will be rather contingent on the state equipping and upgrading its human capital. The state is not remiss in spending on educating Sarawakians either.
Abang Johari is mulling free university education and towards that goal, new universities and colleges are being set up, not just in Kuching but in Sibu, Bintulu and Miri as well. State-built international schools are coming up.
With all the requisite hardware being looked into, perhaps more attention should next be focused on the educational software bit.
A professor in a Kuching university this writer recently talked to lamented the challenges in enrolling new students.
He said growing numbers are expressing more interest in becoming social-media influencers and content creators rather than enrolling into university.
What is more, new universities and colleges, this professor said, are by and large offering basically similar courses and may only end up cannibalising each other in pursuit of the same limited pool of potential students.
There is surely a case for better coordination and planning by the state education authorities for educational institutions under their charge to differentiate themselves by offering more specialised courses.
Also hovering in the background is the ever-present threat of more promising graduates leaving for greener pastures abroad, if not immediately at least after completing whatever bonds may be tying them down.
Career paths locally must be sufficiently attractive, to say nothing about the lure of far better salaries abroad, not least in Singapore.
The efforts to upgrade public-service pay and instituting a RM2,000-a-month private-sector starting pay are steps in the right direction to ensure a well-trained workforce is incentivised to stay put locally.
There's an even harder question perhaps needs to be addressed as well. Is the Sarawak talent pool sufficiently large and well-equipped to meet the challenges of all the grand plans the state government has in mind to implement?
And if not, what needs doing? Is a comprehensive study being done to identify whatever talent gaps exist or will eventually open up, the better to ascertain how such gaps may be filled?
Is it even feasible, maybe, to mull expanding the Sarawak-Malaysia My Second Home visas for foreigners (and why not other Malaysians as well?) to target those with talents and skills the state needs and is in short supply of, to include not just resident visas but long-term work visas, too?
Sarawak, like the rest of the country, has always been rather unhealthily reliant on foreign labour for the hard and mostly menial jobs that locals refuse to take.
But if academicians talk of headwinds in enrolling students in tertiary institutions, are we staring at a looming crisis in filling new jobs that the state hopes to create in new-frontier economic fields it hopes to attract?
Added to these challenges is the cloud in the horizon posed by the growing reality that Sarawak in recent years is already recording fewer births coupled with more ageing people.
A better future for all therefore requires not just greater economic opportunities but people equipped to fully grasp such opportunities.
* The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching