Why should I consider vocational and technical education?

Admit it! When we think of vocational and technical education, we oftentimes assume that it is for students who are not great with academics. Even worse, the words sweat, grime, stuffy workshopsand manual labour automatically play in mind.

Don’t be fooled by appearances…

That’s the typical response from people brought up in societies where white-collar jobs are desired and glorified. In Malaysia, only 10 percent of upper secondary students are enrolled in technical and vocational courses, lower than the 44% enrollment of students in developed countries. In Germany, Finland and Austria, 50% to 80% students pursued vocational education.

With those figures, it is no wonder why we are flooded with many doctors, engineers, pilots, and lawyers.

Do you want to be faceless in a crowd? 

And with that misconception there has been an imbalance in the workforce causing many industries to look far and wide for highly skilled people to do certain jobs a white-collared worker can’t handle.

Contrary to popular belief, vocational and technical education isn’t for the weak of mind but for people who can “see opportunities”. Speaking of opportunities, our country needs at least 3.3 million skilled workers in the next 10 years to meet the demands of the country’s economic developments.

Skills gap continues to halt the country’s development speed

Tourism, agriculture and aviation need more of these skilled people. SCORE (Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy) alone will need 500,000 skilled workers. To make that happen, government is now transforming the Technical Education and Vocational Training (TEVT) sector to make it more appealing to students.

Now, bigger and better.

For the past few years, a lot of transformation programmes have been made. This includes upgrading 79 vocational high schools nationwide to vocational colleges this year as well as the setting up of University Teknologi Sarawak in Sibu. These and more are currently being done to help students meet the demand for skilled jobs that pay as much as RM10,000 a month.

Presently, 117,000 students applied for vocational and technical courses. How about you? Have you made up your mind about vocation and technical education?

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