Creating 10 million data literate talents in Malaysia.

There are 5.36m of new graduates in Malaysia in 2020.

Youth unemployment rose by 22.5%.

31.2% are unemployment due to the lack of skills.

This is just in Malaysia. What about other ASEAN countries?

Hello, we got a problem.

I was one of these students back in 1997.

Spent my education as an engineer and worked my way up, but couldn’t get paid high enough.

So I left in 2000 to get a job with higher pay in Sweden.

But the systemic problem wasn’t fixed as a decade went by.

We are not a high income nation meddling in the no man’s land - not cheap enough for other countries to outsource for low-skilled labor jobs, yet not expensive enough to pay for high-skilled talents.

And I took it upon myself to return Malaysia with a single purpose.

Turn Malaysia into a high-income nation by building a high-skilled youth workforce capable of creating massive impact in their workplaces and turn them into globally competitive companies.

One nation at a time. Start with Malaysia and then across ASEAN.

There shouldn’t be a difference between hiring for high-skilled workforce in US or China vs ASEAN.

And this starts with building critical skills at the bottom of the chain - students and new graduates.

In 1970s-90s the critical skills were in manufacturing, electronics and computers.

Today the critical skills set is data literacy - the ability to work with data, analyze insights and automate work.

Data literacy is the new computer literacy.

Marketers need to be able to integrate, collect data and analyze which products are performing for which segments, then create automated interventions to capture those segments.

Engineers got to be able to install mechanisms to collect data, analyze them real-time and automate workflows.

Lead generation, pricing based on variables, product selection based on locations, decision to take option A or B - all these are augmented and automated.

Any workers can’t go without data literacy like how you can not be computer illiterate today.

Let me bust the myth. It’s not about training data scientists only.

It’s about having data literate professionals.

This is why it’s important to skill up.

But the old way is to get a bunch of trainers and simply skill up or just hire the data professionals.

Employers, before you spend your next hiring or training, you got to analyze, augment and automate your planning by adding an intelligence in your decision-making.

What type of skills are required in the new business model?

What skills do each of your talents have and what they want to learn?

What opportunities can you match to them that are aligned with the companies’ interests?

What skills combo can be put together into job roles?

How do you verify if talents possess certain skills?

There are a lot more that must be known so that you don’t waste your resources. And it doesn’t have to take long or expensive.

It’s just a matter of adding an intelligence layer in your planning, hiring and training.

We have a mission to upskill 10m data literate workforce in ASEAN who will be leading a bright future for us when we grow old.

Talk to us and we will show you:

• How to drive digital transformation with skills transformation
• 10 types of skills gaps and how to close them
• Building institutional skills beyond talents

#jobs #skillset #datadriven

About the Author.

Sharala Axryd is passionate about data driven business transformations & driving data science education in ASEAN. A natural thought leader, she is a highly-sought-after speaker for conferences with topics ranging from analytics to women in STEM.