Creating Sustainable and Competitive Employees through the Design of Innovative Higher Education Curriculum

Salina Daud, Nurazariah Abidin, Noraina Mazuin Sapuan and Jegatheesan Rajadurai

 

1Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia

2IKIP International College Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia

Copyright © 2010 Salina Daud, Nurazariah Abidin, Noraina Mazuin Sapuan and Jegatheesan Rajadurai. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License unported 3.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that original work is properly cited

Abstract

The employability of graduates is dependent on their possession of relevant attributes needed in their respective industries. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the gap between the important elements of Higher Education Institutions’ graduates’ attributes and their actual performance when employed by industry. The dimensions of attributes and the performance of these graduates are considered in four broad areas, namely knowledge, skills, abilities and personality. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire distributed to Human Resource Managers or supervisors of the graduates in 1000 top companies in Malaysia. The results show that the graduates’ performance failed to meet managers’ perceptions of the importance attributes that should be possessed by these graduates. Therefore, the Higher Education Institutions should take prompt action to review the current curriculum in order to meet industry demands and market needs. The design of higher education curriculum should be directed towards incorporating attributes that are expected of the graduates and relevant to the specific industry in order to produce employable graduates. This approach will allow for effective corrective actions and the improvement of the perceived problem areas found in all four dimensions.

Keywords: Higher Education Institutions, Graduate employability, Curriculum design, Important-performance.
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