Skilled Workers can Demand Better Salary

Salaries of employees can go up by 10-20% if they have a chance to attend after-work training at Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) institutions.

Human Resources Minister M. Kulasegaran says that when employees are upskilled and reskilled, they are ready to push up their salary. “If every employee in Malaysia is skilled, even janitors, they can command a good income."

“If Singapore can do it, there’s no reason why we cannot do it,” he said. Kulasegaran had previously suggested that TVET institutions should run from 5.30pm to 11pm instead of just the normal working hours of 8 am to 5 pm.

Kula said solutions were being looked into to facilitate training for employees, particularly those whose employers may be hesitant to send them for training. Some employers, he said, had valid concerns that their employees would leave for better jobs after they had undergone training.

Picture by The Malaysian Insight

“We have to have a win-win solution. We have to come up with a better plan where the employee has the right to go for training,” the Human Resources Minister said.

One proposal that can be implemented is to have an employer and employee sign an agreement where the employee is bonded to the employer for a period of time after the training is over.

“For the employers, it is very saddening to send employees for training and they just leave. It will affect their businesses, so they must be able to ‘hold back’ (their employees),” said Kulasegaran.

The government, he said, was also looking at the types of incentives they could offer to workers to upskill and reskill themselves. Kula added that the emphasis on TVET could help bring up the rate of skilled employees from the current 28% to 35% in 2020.

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Source: The Star