KUALA LUMPUR (May 4): The Malaysian Productivity Corporation (MPC) will continue to strengthen the country’s education agenda towards increasing productivity and meeting the needs of the workforce in the future.
Its director-general Datuk Abdul Latif Abu Seman said formal and non-formal education factors would be taken into account, as both played an important role in ensuring labour availability and marketability.
“More thorough and effective data collection is among the first steps in improving the educational attainment of the people.
“It is important to give a picture of the current situation and the education gap that exists. The analysis based on the information collected can then be used to improve the country’s formal and non-formal education system,” he said in a statement.
In the Budget 2021, a total of RM50.4 billion has been allocated, or 15.6% of the government’s total expenditure, and the education sector among the largest recipients.
Commenting further, Abdul Latif said in an effort to obtain national education data involving non-formal learning, MPC had organised a workshop with the aim of developing a comprehensive reference for non-formal education programs.
According to him, the accumulated input can then be classified in the educational achievement data of Malaysians, for the Labour Force Survey by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DoSM).
“The results of the workshop are very significant, with the intention to increase more than 50% of the people’s educational attainment to higher education by 2025, and towards the use of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 2011 measurement method by DoSM in 2022,” he said.
Non-formal education, which includes various programmes offered by industry, training institutions and public or private institutions of higher learning, is an important factor, and is taken into account by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) in determining a country’s educational achievement in the global competitiveness report.
