Monday July 12, 2010
Policy Perspective - by Tan Sri Sulaiman Mahbob
A NEW announcement in the 10th Malaysia Plan calls for the creation of a new agency called Talent Corporation.
This move reflects the critical importance of managing talents in the immediate future within the country, not only to stall the brain drain but more to address the issue of human capital in a total manner, in a way that human capital deserves to be planned, developed, monitored, and nurtured.
Managing talents, especially at the higher levels of job echelons, demands an in-depth understanding of the factors that attract and retain, beyond the mere concern of wages and return to their output.
Of course wages and salaries are important, but the needs to meet the way of life of the professional and the talented, their families, their need for meeting the wider interests related to their career and job (such as research, publication, international connections, etc) are equally important.
In the past we have largely attended to the issues pertaining to supplies of skilled workers and technologists, such as engineers and medical personnel.
This response was fine for those times.
But with the march towards greater globalisation and liberalisation, highly skilled workers become global workers and are sought after by several markets and nations, which offer them handsome rewards and returns for their skills.
These new brands of talents are those who create intellectual wealth and the value-add to an offering and service.
It is they who spearhead innovation and creativity.
Indeed the many supporting activities and jobs created are merely there because of the simple fact that the top talents and top brains are there within the establishments.
Such talents are not only necessarily in manufacturing activities but more so in high value-added services such as medical services, engineering and also legal services.
We may want to ask several pertinent questions: why do many Malaysian doctors prefer to serve in Singapore?
Why many of us seek complex legal advice abroad?
Have we invested much in the Islamic finance legal expertise?
Do we have many design houses here to create new products meeting the changes in fashion abroad?
Do we attract the best architects to set up offices here?
How much expertise have we groomed in the arts and theatre, whose products and services are attractions of high income families? Many have said that it is easier to bring low skill workers into this country than to bring in highly skilled professionals and trained workforce.
I hope this is not true.
Trained and highly skilled Malaysians are now working in many parts of the world, such as in China, the Middle East, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.
The more countries liberalise and their economies internationalised, the more they need trained lawyers, accountants, engineers, and advanced skills in medicine and other technologies.
With our education system and tertiary education based on international standards, and exposure of our workforce to international business practices, thanks to the policy encouraging foreign investments, the Malaysian skilled workers and professionals are a target for many foreign recruitment exercises.
Thus, the recognition for managing talents is timely albeit rather late in the day.
It needs a total exercise to address the issues ranging from wages and salaries, immigration, other employment terms, and even in concerns related to their families and recreation.
While the concern is now identified by the government in terms of establishing the Talent Corporation, the subject is equally pertinent, and perhaps all the more relevant, to strategic and manpower planning in the corporate sector. Malaysia should not be seen as a low cost producer any more.
Investors should not come here because Malaysia subsidises its energy or facilitates the recruitment of low skilled foreign labour.
They should be here and be involved in the total transformation towards high value-added production in both services and manufacturing activities.
Hence, their concern should be how to enhance technology transfer and absorption and in so doing be allowed to bring in as many top talents into the country as possible.
For these groups of workers who possess high talents, wages and salaries are a small portion of the total turnover and value-added creation of establishments.
The amount of value creation, the connectivity and the identity that they bring, the potential of new and related activities that they can generate are plentiful, to be reaped by the economy.
For this, Malaysia must raise salaries and wages to retain trained and high skilled talents.
In another dimension, being protected from the policies of liberalisation that can bring in high talents from overseas will in the long run undermine our capacity for generating greater income to all Malaysians and restrain our economic transformation that we need quite badly. Our professionals are quite protective of their markets; they have residential requirements for professionals to practice.
Additionally, the laws in the services sectors need to be reviewed to encourage easier recruitment of foreign expertise and talents to support new and high value economic activities in the country.
In a wider context, the liberalisation process taking place amongst neighbouring countries will greatly attract investments there while our domestic technological capability has not caught up with the exercise of technology transfer that new foreign investments can bring and at the level we much desire.
In the short run, the technological gap can be narrowed by recruiting foreign talents, until such time Malaysia can adequately produce its own. Hopefully, the new Talent Corp will begin work soon.
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/7/12/business/6629707&sec=business
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