Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is in the news again.
This time, the government is looking to improve the value of TVET graduates. One such move is to raise their starting salary to RM3,000.
Directionally right, we have to say. Because these are skilled workers at the heart of Malaysia's industrialisation by the government's own admission.
Like any graduate, they deserve to begin their career with a good pay packet. Under the 11th Malaysia Plan (2016-2020), 60 per cent of the 1.5 million jobs were reserved for TVET graduates. Under the 12th Malaysia Plan (2012-2025), the percentage is somewhere there, if not more.
The point is that TVET jobs have surpassed other jobs. Expect them to do the same for the 13th Malaysia Plan. Raising the starting salary is one way to attract the less academically inclined students to the 1,200 TVET institutions in the country.
This is certainly a good sell. But the government needs to do more.
Here is why. Malaysia attracts just five per cent of its youth to technical vocations. Singapore does that more than four times over. RM3,000 alone isn't going to cause a mad rush to the 1,200 institutions. What is needed is for the government to adopt what Singapore is doing right.
But first, we must reengineer the TVET system. The governance of the entire system has been found wanting by those who have cared to study it. One such study was done by the Penang Institute.
Here is its January judgment: a spaghetti bowl of overlapping jurisdictions and standards. We could not have put it better. How can it not be when multiple ministries and agencies put their busy bureaucratic hands in the bowl? Is it really that hard to have one lead agency?
TVET is not a new thing for Malaysia. It is as old as the 1970s. Like most things in Malaysia, we let it flow hither and thither until someone comes up with some bright idea. The more foreign the better. And so it was, with the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the whole of Malaysia is now hurrying like the hare to who knows where.
From the 1970s to 2023, we have been zigging and zagging on TVET, missing the lesson that the shortest distance to any destination is a straight line. Every administration seems to have a "new" policy on the much-flogged TVET. It's little wonder we needed five decades to get here. The government needs to correct the zigs and zags first if it wants to go after the Singapore numbers.
Now for the Singapore story. No one is pretending, least of all Singapore, that TVET in the island state is an overnight success. Like here, technical education is a 50-year-old story. But the difference is that Singapore knows what levers to pull to make technical education flourish there. One such lever is filtering students into technical and non-technical streams at schools.
Like in Malaysia, not all Singaporeans are academically inclined. The other lever it pulls is to get the TVET system to sell itself. Singapore's Institute of Technical Education, set up in 1992, has done an excellent job. Many say the ITE helped the island state sell TVET to Singaporeans. Small wonder, there are four times as many people interested in TVET in Singapore than in Malaysia.