We have failed to appreciate our talented people and the fact that these people will significantly prop up our corporate and national competitiveness.

On Monday, higher education minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin said during the signing of an MoU between his ministry and the Securities Commission Malaysia that there was a 40% shortfall of technical experts in the country’s capital market, especially in audit companies and investment banks.

The minister said both sides would kickstart a Capital Market Graduate Program (CMGP) aimed at addressing the issue of capital market expert shortage.

If the minister were to give his remarks in a signing ceremony between the higher education ministry and the energy sector, AI, automation system, computer hardware and software development, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment supplies… he would very likely say the same thing.

For so many decades this country has been banishing some of its best brains, and it is now time for us to savor the bitter fruit of our own doing, as we struggle with acute shortage in technical experts in all fields.

Talent is of utmost importance to a country’s development. Several years ago, Kelantan’s Sultan Muhammad V said when he was the reigning Yang di-Pertuan Agong that talent is the country’s single most important asset and key to the country’s competitiveness.

In 2021, the US government “ordered” Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, to set up a 4 nm process chip foundry in the US. However, the company’s founder Morris Chang was downbeat about the proposal because the US lacked the relevant expertise on top of the relative lackadaisical work attitude in that country, which would bring up production cost and lower product quality, hence the company’s overall competitiveness.

As a matter of fact, not only chip manufacturing, the survival of practically any tech-heavy industry is very much pegged on the availability of expertise.

The US has been able to lead the world in many high-tech industries thanks to the influx of technology talents from around the world after the Second World War.

Meanwhile, our southern neighbor Singapore has put a lot of emphasis on the nurturing of its talent pool since the dawn of nationhood. As for Malaysia, we have unfortunately become the primary “exporter” of skilled workforce to the tiny city-state.

In early March, human resources minister V. Sivakumar said some 1.86 million Malaysians were employed overseas, of whom 1.13 million were in Singapore, including top-notched personnel in various fields.

For a country with a workforce of only 16 million, the brain drain to the tune of 1.86 million will have disastrous impact on the country’s long-term economic development, and will hamper the government’s effort to woo foreign investments.

During Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s official visit to China late last month, he witnessed the inking of some 19 MOU’s involving a potential investment sum of RM170 billion between Malaysian and Chinese corporations.

Subsequently, a special parliamentary committee was set up to implement the various projects between Malaysia and China.

Nevertheless, if the investors really come here, all we can provide are land, cheap utility and cheap labor. We don’t have sufficient skilled professionals needed by the industry. This is poised to compromise the results of the investments because we lack the expertise to inherit any transferred technology, less so produce our own pool of professionals who will help in the country’s industrial transformation.

Hundreds of thousands of new Malaysian graduates are churned out by domestic and oversea universities every year. Quantitatively, this should be enough to satisfy the needs of the country’s labor market. But in reality this is not the case.

Firstly, our university programs have not been designed to optimally meet the requirements of the market.

Last year, Universiti Malaya announced that it would cancel some of the less in-demand courses and programs. Given the fact that the “half-life” of knowledge is fast shrinking these past few years, it is essential for local university programs to keep up with the pace of the fast changing world.

Secondly, the continued depreciation of the local currency is perceived to augur well for exports but unfavorable to imports, at least from the perspectives of economics.

If we were to extend such a concept to the job market, where there is a choice, we can be quite sure that Malaysian graduates will prefer a job offer in Singapore whose currency is traded 3.2 to the ringgit.

The same goes with Taiwan. A ringgit could be exchanged for 17 New Taiwan Dollars three decades ago. Today we can only do that for 6.7. A Taiwanese graduate can easily make more than RM100,000 there a year. They will rather go to Singapore than coming back here!

Thirdly, Malaysia is a veritable training ground for experts. A graduate who has a few years of working experience in Malaysia will be very much sought after in Singapore.

A Penang R&D center set up by Pua Khein-Seng, a Malaysian graduating from Taiwan, eventually succumbed to poaching by Singapore companies, having produced a substantial pool of talents over the three years of its existence.

We have failed to appreciate our talented people and the fact that these people will significantly prop up our corporate and national competitiveness.

When we are contented with thriving on low-tech industries, we will never know how important talent is to the country. We only begin to realize how far we fall back now as we strive to woo investments.

It may be too late now as it takes time to nurture our own talents.