Graduate Employability: What Went Wrong?

Abstract

Unemployment exists due to lack of jobs available in the market. With large number of graduating students per year, the competition to get job becomes fiercer. In order to remain competitive, it is essential for the prospective employees to know the reasons why companies reject certain job applications. Surprisingly, the job applications from some students with excellent academic performance can also be rejected. Hence, to further understand this scenario, 124 questionnaires have been distributed to 100 companies in Malaysia who were having experience in training undergraduate students from one of the public universities in Malaysia for five months during their final semester. The managers of the companies were asked to evaluate the performance of the graduating students especially in terms of their skills and qualities by using Likert Scale. All questionnaires were emailed directly via the platform of Google Drive to the managers who were selected based on their role as the immediate supervisors of the trainees. All data received were then analyzed by using SPSS software. The findings show that both graduate qualities and skills play important roles in helping students to get job. However, the students with good qualities are more preferable even if they have lack of skills. Moreover, low motivational level, lack of creativity and leadership values, lack of language proficiency skills, and lack of problem solving were identified as among the major weaknesses of the students since they received scores below than its par. Hence, it is suggested that all university courses need to integrate those elements in the teaching and learning process.