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What do Malaysian teens want to be when they grow up? Behavioral data from 300,000 upper secondary students reveals that young Malaysians overwhelmingly gravitate toward a small set of conventional jobs. It’s a safe choice but does it match the skills our economy will need in the coming decades? On this episode of #ConsiderThis Melisa Idris speaks with Maha Subramaniam, Vice President of Creador Foundation, and Head of its nonprofit, Schola, alongside Kularetnam Vijayakumar, CEO of Yayasan Tunku Abdul Rahman.
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00:00Music
00:00Hello and good evening, I'm Melissa Idris. Welcome to Consider This.
00:14This is the show where we want you to consider and then reconsider what you know of the news of the day.
00:19So what do Malaysian teens want to be when they grow up?
00:22The behavioural data from 300,000 upper secondary school students reveals that young Malaysians overwhelmingly gravitate towards a small set of conventional jobs.
00:35Now it's a safe choice, but does it match the skills that our economy will need in the coming decades?
00:41Well, joining me on the show to discuss this further, I have Maha Subramaniam, who is the Vice President of Kredor Foundation and head of its non-profit, Skola.
00:51And I also have Kularatnam Vijayakumar, CEO of Yayasan Tengku Abdurrahman.
00:56Both of you, welcome to the show. I understand that you've worked together on certain initiatives.
01:02I'm happy to have both of you come talk to us a little bit about what young Malaysians are thinking about in terms of their career decisions.
01:10Maha, talk to us first about Skola, which is a free online career planning tool.
01:16So some of the data that you have, have revealed some fascinating insights into how young Malaysians are making these career decisions.
01:25Tell us more about that.
01:26Yeah, sure. Thank you so much. Really excited to be here.
01:29So actually today marks our one year since going live with the platform, Skola platform.
01:33Congratulations, one year.
01:34Thank you. And so before we launched the website itself, we had like a pre-survey with 1,000 students first, just to understand, you know, actually currently what's the state of thinking about the career.
01:48So out of 1,000 students, we realized that 40% of the students named one of these four jobs.
01:54It's either doctor, lawyer, business person or a teacher.
01:58Right. And then when we asked about, OK, fine, you know, it's not for us to say right or wrong.
02:03But when we asked about, hey, can you explain a bit more about the jobs or pathways to get there?
02:08Almost 80% of them had sort of no idea.
02:10They couldn't really verbalize the steps and further insights into it.
02:14So that was sort of the baseline of for most students that they really knew just some sets of jobs.
02:22And then we started with that.
02:23So our hypothesis of Skola in the very, very initial days was, hey, students don't know different jobs out there.
02:29We show them, you know, like a diverse array of careers and they would then consider that.
02:35So then fast forward to all this data that we have.
02:37Then we realized a very now new interesting pattern.
02:40So we first went live with like this career quiz.
02:43So, you know, our issue was career planning sounds so boring, right?
02:48Like how do we make people care about career planning?
02:52So the quiz was more of a hook to draw students into, hey, like this is fun, you know, let's plan it.
02:59So then we realized actually that wasn't a problem since we got a lot of volume of students wanting to do the quiz.
03:04And then they were then matched to a list of jobs.
03:07So we on the platform have like 150 jobs, like really diverse jobs from more hands-on jobs to STEM jobs, they're really diverse.
03:15But then now the new problem was students were getting these matches, really diverse matches to their personalities.
03:21But we would see that they would literally like scroll, like scroll all the way until job number, say, 30, 40, until they saw that teacher or that lawyer.
03:31More conventional jobs.
03:32And then they would click on it.
03:33So then we realized, okay, we sort of solved for a hook in terms of getting them to care or be curious.
03:39But the next step was, but they're still only clicking on familiar jobs.
03:43So the whole constraint of familiarity was like such a big issue.
03:47And then very quickly after that, we realized, okay, now we have to add on new things to pivot.
03:51So how do we give students this like safety of, you can explore, it's not that big of an issue to explore unfamiliar jobs.
03:58So we realized that asking students who you are and matching to jobs and asking them to explore different jobs felt so core to their identity that was scary.
04:08Then we, students actually, they think about jobs from the context of the closest was, oh, I like these subjects.
04:13So we very quickly deployed like the subject to job tool.
04:17Okay.
04:18And it was so fascinating because it's such a simple tweak of framing.
04:22So instead of saying, this is who you are and these are jobs you can explore.
04:25We, this new tool was, you tell us what subject you like, and then we will tell you what jobs are matched to this subject.
04:32Then the, the shift in students exploring newer jobs just really improved by so much.
04:39So this like tweaks and framing was just very fascinating for us to, to do.
04:43And obviously for us, it was like a trial and error thing.
04:45Yeah.
04:45Yeah.
04:46So that's wonderful.
04:47It tells me a few things that students are really hungry for this type of guidance.
04:52They're looking for maybe ways to learn about different things that are outside of what they already talked about, familiarity, right?
05:01Coolab, was this something that you also observed is part of your work with Yaya Santa?
05:05Yes, definitely.
05:07So something that we saw over and over again with the students that we work with, especially through our Closing the Gap program where we work with high school students, is that familiarity is king, especially for students who are first generation degree students, meaning that parents did not go to university.
05:21So what are the careers they're familiar with?
05:23You know, you go to the doctor, you know, you've probably met a teacher, you've probably met a pharmacist, maybe you know, an accountant, perhaps you've heard of a lawyer or you've watched a lawyer TV show.
05:33Something we've seen as well is sometimes a lot of students will tell us that they want to be criminologists because they've seen CSI.
05:39Yeah, yeah, really forensic scientists.
05:41Yeah, forensic science.
05:43So familiarity in media plays a very big role.
05:45Wow.
05:46And that's why with our mentorship program, you know, we try to pair students with people from diverse pathways so they get a sense and exposure of these different, different things.
05:54For example, we also run the Future Ready program, which is intended to expose people to careers like being a consultant or working in knowledge services.
06:01Because, you know, even for me, right, my parents had degrees, but if I told my parents I wanted to be a consultant, they'd probably be like, why?
06:07What is that?
06:08Like, what is that?
06:09Because it's not a traditional career.
06:11It's not a career that everybody is aware of.
06:14So definitely, I think there's a very big role in providing exposure.
06:18But once that exposure is provided, we also need to provide encouragement so that the students feel comfortable and safe to pursue these careers.
06:26What do you think it tells us about the way society views what is success?
06:31I'm very curious to know.
06:33I mean, when you think about some of these conventional jobs that you talked about, these are what we traditionally think of.
06:41Okay, if I have this job, I will be considered successful by society.
06:45Does it tell you a story about how we talk about success in front of particularly young people?
06:51Yeah, I think for us, in terms of what society, like what this tells us about success is that it's actually across all age groups we realize what's important or what's success for people oftentimes is either you earn a specific income or you have certain lifestyle aspirations.
07:10And this is the one that we feel like actually it's across, you know, at an adult, at a young age and when we ask someone what's important, that's that.
07:17But what is very interesting about then how that definition of success morphs into like how I'm going to achieve it is oftentimes for students, it's just sort of pigeonhole or like it becomes a binary.
07:30And we see students fall into two camps, so it's either I need to achieve this definition of success, which, you know, most people strive for, which is income or aspiration.
07:41So the first camp was conventional pathways, which means they default to these things.
07:46But oftentimes when we then prod, it's really not because that they truly believe that's the only route to success.
07:54It's literally because they don't know other options out there.
07:57Okay, so it's just a lack of information.
07:59Yeah, and then the second camp of students is typically in the short term camp.
08:04So it's more of my aspirations are income, but the time matters, like quick income, you know, that matters a lot.
08:12So that's sort of the...
08:13Is that to do with kind of cost pressures or like daily pressures of making money, is it?
08:21Yeah, yeah. So for us, like it's too, right?
08:23We don't want to like, we completely acknowledge that the pressures of some, for some students needing to fund their family and all is such a big thing.
08:31But initially it started with that.
08:33But now we are realizing across like a huge set of students, even students that don't have those upfront pressures of funding and all,
08:40also then fall into this earning quick only because they just generally don't have an idea of long-termism and what an upside of thinking about careers in a long time frame means for them.
08:51That's a good point.
08:52It also may be, I wonder whether students who prefer maybe an upfront kind of steady income as opposed to aiming for a high income over the years,
09:01speaks about the student's perception of social mobility, right?
09:07The ability to transcend maybe socioeconomic class.
09:09You're absolutely right.
09:10I think as higher education becomes more and more popular, the economic promise of a degree becomes less strong, right?
09:17A degree is no longer a guarantee of a high paying job.
09:20I think KRI came up with a paper back in 2022, where they said that 90% of graduates from low-income families were earning below RM2,000 after university degree.
09:32And if you compare, you know, if you get a job without a degree, you'd probably be earning around the same amount as well.
09:38So the economic promise of a degree is no longer there.
09:41That's when you get people questioning, why should I do a degree in the first place?
09:44Why should I delay earning for three, four years when I could go straight into the workplace and earn the same amount?
09:50So there is really a need to make sure that students are equipped for the workplace
09:55and to make sure that they have jobs available for them that provide commensurate wages.
10:00Because, for example, what we see, and this is something that our human resources minister said recently as well,
10:06which was that despite the focus on STEM, we don't have a STEM industry that can support that supply of STEM graduates.
10:12And the result is what we can see.
10:15This is something that the Department of Statistics said last year.
10:1870% of students or people between the ages 15 to 24 are underemployed, meaning they're in jobs that do not require a degree.
10:27Wow.
10:28Yeah.
10:29So when you talk, Mahai, you mentioned that some of these young people, they just don't know.
10:35They don't know the pathway.
10:36They're not familiar with the diversity of career options.
10:41Why is that?
10:44Are our schools not giving them enough information to explore the full range of career options?
10:50Yeah.
10:50So, I mean, schools have a really tough job, right?
10:52In the sense of their mandate now involves, you know, foundational numeracy, literacy, curriculum, all of these things.
11:00But I think what we have realized, and obviously then now this added pressure of being more involved in students' lives after, you know, prepping them for it.
11:11But I think for us is what has been encouraging, you know, with Skola, we have about now 9,000 teachers and counselors who use it.
11:18So it's actually through all our interactions, it's not for the lack of like willingness to participate in it.
11:23But it's just that how do they even go about it, right?
11:27So I think the good starting point is everyone is really bought in.
11:31They do agree that, hey, this is important and they're like super bought in.
11:35I think the second part to it is there's two critical things that needs to happen at a school juncture.
11:40First is someone that tells students like, hey, you have to think about careers now, right?
11:46And then the second part is given that you think about it, right?
11:49These are all the very specific information about careers that you need to know.
11:53That second part is honestly quite impossible for a teacher or a school system to do because it's just so...
11:58Could you give me an example of what kind of information you need to be?
12:01So for example, if you know, you are dealing as a teacher, I would deal with hundreds if not thousands of students.
12:07And if I am interested in say a data analyst job and another student of mine is interested in a clinical lab technician to have that breadth of knowledge and like not just know that job exists,
12:18but being able to say, hey, I think this is this pathway and all.
12:21This is really tough.
12:21So how we see it is if the school systems can really partner on the first part, which is that entry point of getting students to think about,
12:31hey, please think about careers now.
12:32It's really important.
12:33We think of industry partners, ourselves, NGOs, everyone as complementary to that, not to replace school-based guidance,
12:41but complementary to then equip them with tools and resources to do the next step, like the last mile.
12:46Here are more specific information that you can use to nudge them.
12:50When you give them the kind of range of career options, are you thinking about what kind of jobs we will need in the future as well?
13:00Yeah. So we currently, we have different ways of doing it. So in terms of just the directory itself that we have a few things like STEM jobs, we have it.
13:10We are realising its current student's appetite is when there's STEM, there is the highest click jobs are still doctor, pharmacist, you know, chemist.
13:19Also, in terms of STEM, only science is S equals to STEM for most students.
13:24Okay.
13:25So how do we...
13:26They don't think about the TEMs.
13:27Yes. Yeah. So, and we have all of those jobs.
13:30And so currently, we are trying to ensure that we nudge students towards these pathways through different factors, right?
13:36And giving them a fuller picture of, hey, think about demand factors, think about salary progression and growth factors.
13:43So that, and honestly, when people, students, when we realise they are aware and they can comprehend this,
13:48then they're like, okay, fine, I will explore these, the TEM, basically.
13:52Yeah. Yeah.
13:53I would note that when it comes to employment, I don't think schools have the primary role here.
13:58I think it's important to note that we as a society, we need to be prioritising young people and their ability to transition into meaningful employment.
14:07If you look at the national education philosophy, all right, it doesn't say that, oh, the job of a school is to prepare a student for work.
14:13The purpose of education is to prepare someone for life, not to make a living, right?
14:18And even if you look at our national education philosophy, it says it's a continuous effort to develop students holistically and equally across multiple frameworks.
14:27Because truthfully, right, if we just focus on career prep or, you know, learning certain skills or learning to use certain tools,
14:35we're at a real risk of, you know, developing a society of people who are technically skilled but morally void.
14:42You know, Martin Luther King said this too.
14:44He said, you know, we live in a society of guided missiles and misguided men.
14:49And that's a society, he said that 50 years ago.
14:51Oh my gosh.
14:5160 years ago.
14:52So relevant today.
14:53It's still relevant today, yes.
14:54So I feel that schools exist to provide that baseline guidance.
14:59And of course, more can be done in terms of exposure.
15:02But I also wonder, you know, what is being done elsewhere in society, right?
15:06Are there opportunities for paid internships that are accessible to everybody?
15:10Is there career exposure?
15:12Is there more connections in industry and schools?
15:15Right.
15:15That's interesting.
15:16Do you think that young people are genuinely choosing some of these careers or are they mostly following the paths of the adults around them?
15:25I wonder whether it's not the young people who we need to give information, to equip with information.
15:33Maybe it's the parents that need to also be educated about the diverse range of career.
15:38Definitely, definitely.
15:39Are they listening to their parents or are they making their own up your mind?
15:42They are definitely listening to their parents.
15:43And so like if we see like about half students when we say, okay, why this pathway?
15:47It's usually, oh, my family or parents and all.
15:50But I think we do acknowledge for parents.
15:52It's not like it's do this or not, but they can be convinced.
15:56And it's purely like for all of the circle of influence, everyone doesn't have enough information.
16:02Right.
16:02So it's really just that.
16:04And I would, we've spoken to, you know, some parents and all as well.
16:07It is scary to tell your child to pursue something that you also have no idea what it is.
16:13So like for me as well, this, this idea of school is actually very, very personal.
16:17Like my dad was a rubber tapper and then he was a technician in TNB.
16:20Then me, I got a scholarship, you know, so I sort of went and realized that there are all these other jobs there.
16:26But I remember telling, when I was telling my dad, I was going to pursue, you know, something like this, like to start this.
16:32For someone who worked in a power station for 40 years.
16:35And I was at that point, like already mid-20s, can make my own.
16:39And they were just like, you know, very resistant because it's scary.
16:42Like, what does that mean?
16:42Like not a single person in our entire family has done anything.
16:47So I think it's not that parents cannot be convinced.
16:50So for us, what we try to do to minimize, just from a website perspective, we ensure that every job guide is, we attach real career professionals working in there.
17:01So there are voices of it too.
17:02And that really does give parents assurance.
17:05That's something that we've seen that when we see this person from this company said this, they're like, oh, okay, okay.
17:10And yeah, just building on that as well.
17:12Yeah, that's actually something I really appreciated about what Skola did.
17:14So, you know, when I went for their launch, you know, they brought in professionals from across different sectors.
17:17And it was an opportunity for students and their parents both to have these kinds of conversations.
17:21And I think when we talk about taking a whole of society approach, that's the kind of thing we want to see, right?
17:26Like how can both parents and children be able to speak to people in different industries and have a sense of different careers?
17:32Because I also think it's a bit unfair for you to expect like a 17, 18 year old to convince their parents like, yes, I should be studying AI.
17:41I'm sure if I tried that with someone my age too, I don't think it would work out necessarily.
17:45I mean, representation is so important.
17:47When you see a kind of living, breathing person represent this field, it's so much easier to want to follow in their footsteps.
17:55I saw someone reading the news when I was 12 and thought, oh, that sounds like an interesting job.
18:02Maybe I should do that too.
18:03And that became my kind of career pathway, my dream.
18:06So I should also probably ask you whether you noticed any gender differences in the data.
18:13Were boys and girls choosing, making different career options?
18:18Yeah.
18:18So currently we don't have as big of a subset to say, but there are differences.
18:23So very traditionally, the boys tend to click on slightly more engineering jobs, more technician, hands-on jobs.
18:30For women, it was more dominating like doctors, so some slightly more caregiving nature, like, you know, in terms of being a teacher and all of that.
18:38But as across both, it's still very traditional jobs dominating both.
18:44So it wasn't so much about that gender difference, but more about the familiarity of it.
18:49I can share that what we see, especially because we run a scholarship as well, right?
18:52We see that when it comes to university selection and scholarships as well, women, girls, are a bit more limited by this expectation that they take on caregiving, not just of their parents, but also of their siblings.
19:05And so, for example, we hear students say things like, oh, I wouldn't want to go to university away from home.
19:09I wouldn't want to get a job away from home because I need to take care of my parents.
19:13I need to take care of my younger siblings.
19:14And this is something that we see constraining a lot of women who are pursuing higher education and entering the workforce as well, which I think also points to a need to how do we think about not just childcare, but also, you know, care for parents soon to be ageing out.
19:29Yeah, definitely.
19:30Already so young, they're thinking about these things, right?
19:33The caregiving responsibility kicks in really young.
19:37Something you said a bit earlier really struck me, Kula.
19:40You talked about how schools are, their primary responsibility is not to prepare for work, but prepare for life.
19:46And I do want to talk a little bit about that because I wonder whether there is that guidance.
19:52And what I like about your ASLanta is that the guidance is beyond just kind of financial guidance, right?
19:57There is some mentorship involved and kind of leadership coaching involved.
20:01How are we preparing our young students to transition from school, the highly structured school environment, into the more kind of self-directed world of university, world of work?
20:16How are we preparing them for life, do you think?
20:19I think there's perhaps some level of contradiction here in that we're seeing some really positive efforts, I think.
20:24Because something that we used to see or probably experience ourselves, right, was that there's a big gap in how things are run in school and how things are run in university.
20:33But since then, you know, especially with new curriculums, the Ministry of Education now, they get students to run projects that are similar to university projects, you know.
20:41Like they have to interview people, they have to go to museums.
20:44At school, at the school level.
20:46So I used to be a history teacher and I had to send my students to museums so that they could write papers.
20:51And I was like, this is kind of like what I had to do back in university.
20:54So we're seeing some positive efforts there.
20:55But at the same time, if you look at something like a high-stakes exam like SPM, we've made a lot of progress here in that, you know, we've gotten rid of UPSR, we've gotten rid of PT3.
21:05But there's still this feeling, and we see this a lot in the students that we work with, that SPM is the be-all, end-all.
21:12You know, this is the determinant of your future.
21:14So when we ask students, you know, what do you plan to work as, what do you plan to do, you know, after you finish secondary school, they will usually tell us, I don't want to think about this until after SPM.
21:22Yeah, that's very true.
21:24So if you as a student, right, your entire time in secondary school, you're gearing up for SPM, I don't really expect you to think beyond that.
21:31So I think when we think about how we support students more, we see the effort on the ground.
21:35We see teachers having these conversations with students.
21:38But systemically, I think we need to move away a bit more from high-stakes exams so that the students think a bit more beyond exams and think a bit more about their future beyond the exam results.
21:47Okay.
21:47All right.
21:48And what kind of life readiness skills would you like them to be thinking about?
21:53I think this is something that comes up a lot, right?
21:55I think perhaps you've also heard this.
21:56People say, how come school didn't teach me to do my taxes?
21:59That's true.
22:00But I don't think it is the purpose of a school to teach you to do your taxes, right?
22:03I mean, like, taxes change every year.
22:04Sure.
22:05So I think ultimately, schools should prepare you with the ability to learn.
22:09And this is a question I asked my own AdMaths teacher.
22:12I really appreciate her patience with me.
22:13I was like, why do I have to learn AdMaths?
22:15You know, I have a calculator.
22:18I don't need to learn this.
22:19But what I realized now was that it was trying to teach me logic and an ability to learn that I can see benefiting me in a lot of different ways.
22:26But I think just me as a student, I did not understand that philosophy back then.
22:31So at school, that does exist.
22:33But I would like to see perhaps a bit more explicit mention of that philosophy, right?
22:37That school is to prepare you to learn so that whatever you need to learn across the rest of your life, you're ready.
22:42What about you, Ma?
22:43So for me, so schools are really taking good steps in terms of financial literacy and all.
22:48But I would say I think the fundamental of Scholar is this idea of belief, right?
22:54And for me, belief is actually a muscle that you train.
22:57It's not like, I don't mean it in like a blind optimism sort of way, right?
23:00And I really do think it's a skill set because how can we think about schools preparing students for belief as a skill, right?
23:10Because I really think belief underpins the idea of adaptability because you trial, you error, you fail, fine, you pivot, right?
23:18And I do think sometimes when I think about, you know, people ask, oh, how did that mobility or transition happen?
23:24I would say I was lucky in that I had a lot of sort of belief as a skill trained.
23:29And I really, really wish that that would be as part integral to all of the school systems.
23:35And, you know, and with Scholar, we try to do that as like for us, it's not our role to say don't do that or shut it down because the real world is harsh as it is.
23:44And they will get plenty of that already.
23:46So, how do you do that?
23:48But belief equals to a skill.
23:50So, you have to practice it.
23:52Wow.
23:52Yeah.
23:52And start young practicing that.
23:55Both of you, thank you so much for this.
23:57This is very interesting kind of conversations into how young people are thinking about this.
24:03And we're maybe changing the traditional outlook of what we think is a successful career ladder.
24:09Well, thank you both for being on the show.
24:10Thank you so much for having us.
24:12That's all the time we have for you on this episode of Consider This.
24:15I'm Melissa Idris signing off for the evening.
24:17Thank you so much for watching.
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