aRe yOu skiLls?

Hey! this is me again. Against the times and thought. As we know Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin's recent announcement that the national Vocational Education Transformation (VET) programme will be implemented in 2013 is an important step in support of Malaysia's economic transformation agenda to help produce better educated, skilled and trained human resources. As the labor market becomes more specialized and economies demand higher levels of skills, governments and businesses around the world are increasingly collaborating and investing in the future of vocational education and training. Public-funded vocational education, essentially at the secondary level, is integrated and mainstreamed as part of the education curriculum in many industrialized and developing countries, including in Asia and dovetailed into subsidized apprenticeship or trainee ship initiatives organized and sponsored by businesses leading to skill certification. At post-secondary level, vocational education is typically provided by an institute of technology or an equivalent institution usually leading up to diploma level.

To ensure that vocational education and training is relevant to current and future needs of industry, businesses and governments should collaborate closely to define curriculum content, and plan, organize, implement and monitor both inputs and ascertain the quality of outputs of the vocational education and training program. Vocational education has significantly diversified in particular over the 20th century. The boundaries between integrated vocational education and training and the purely liberal, academic curriculum leading to tertiary qualifications are becoming more blurred. Applied education courses within the school curriculum and institution based training now provide the core human resources for industries such as building manufacture and servicing, tourism, hospitality and entertainment, information technology; retail and service, traditional craft and cottage industries and even in more specialized fields such as design, illustration, horticulture, aquaculture and many more. This trend is expected to continue and expand, allowing more students to access higher education and skills that are and will be in demand.

To have workers, technicians and professionals with the right educational background and the skills that industry requires, it is necessary that educational reforms be instituted that are need-based, purposeful, carefully planned, adequately resourced and sufficiently broad-based to provide the requisite opportunities to all students and young people to pursue a career path relevant to their aptitude and training. As a nation, we must commit ourselves to improving education to make it relevant, provide satisfaction and rewards as well as guidance to students enabling them to choose their career paths and fulfill the needs of the economic transformation that is required for "Wawasan 2020" to be reality. Only by recognizing overwhelming challenges associated with making fundamental changes in education and then investing in systemic reforms, can we create new educational approaches that yield meaningful results.

By enhancing school or college to work transition, we can create valuable educational opportunities for all students. With so much invested already we owe it to ourselves and the nation to make that commitment. don't you got it? believe it :)