Workers’ Competency, Performance and Competitiveness in Malaysia’s Private Education Sector

In Malaysia, the education sector, in particular the private education sector has been expanding rapidly as a result of government policy in liberalizing the sector and to turn Malaysia as a centre of excellence in the educational provision within the Asian region. This subsequently requires a more competent and competitive workforce to spearhead the expansion of this sector. This article aims to investigate determinants of workers’ competency, performance and competitiveness in the education sector so that future human resource development can be enhanced to produce a more competitive workforce. The analysis in this article is based on 567 executives/professionals in the private education sector in four major states, namely Selangor, Penang, Federal Territory and Johor. The study will compute the workers’ competency and performance indices and use these indices to construct competitiveness index, and subsequently regress these indices on several determinant factors, which include human capital, employee attributes and personal characteristics variables. The linear regression model and Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) procedure will be used in the data analysis. Our analysis shows that most of the human capital variables and workers’ attributes contributed significantly to workers’ competency, performance and subsequently their competitiveness.