Assessing Graduates’ Generic Skills: An Indicator of Employability

This concept paper seeks to discuss the issues of the measurement of Malaysian university graduates’ generic skills as an indicator of their employability in the real world job market. Despite the heated discussions and arguments among stakeholders on the problem of rampant unemployment of fresh university graduates, there is still a distinct absence of a valid screening tool to test the level of work readiness of the university students before they are awarded their scrolls. Starting July 2006, the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) instituted the implementation of seven generic skills to be incorporated into the tertiary curriculum in an effort to address and redress the shortcomings in graduate employability. This worthy effort however, has been stymied by the somewhat informal, subjective, and lackadaisical treatment of the generic skills component in the actual implementation. This, coupled with the absence of a validated exit screening tool, undermines all serious efforts to ensure that graduates are genuinely work ready. This concept paper proposes a model called Graduate Employability Model (GEM) as a framework that policy makers and higher education practitioners could use to generate a more stringent quantitative and summative quotient of the future graduates’ employability as indicated by their generic skills.