INSUFFICIENCY OF SOFT SKILLS AMONG GRADUATES WITHIN THE SERVICES AND MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES

Abstract

The unemployment rate in Malaysia is at 3.5% as of February 2023. The competition for employment is tougher due to the rising number of graduates. Employers today consider graduates' Hard and Soft Skills in addition to their academic accomplishments. It was reported that the graduates are not able to secure jobs because they lack of critical thinking and Soft Skills yet we do not exactly what skills are they lacking. The goals of this study are to identify the Soft Skills that the workforce requires, investigate the Soft Skills that companies provide, and identify the graduates' Soft Skills by employers. The samples are employers from the services and manufacturing sectors that were obtained from the Federation of Manufacturing Malaysia. A questionnaire is used and made available online for one month in the form of a Google Form. Using SPPS version 25.0, both descriptive and inferential analyses are performed on the data. Employers stated that teamwork skills are the most important Soft Skills for their organisations and are among the Soft Skills that employers may impart to graduates. The organisations recognise that the graduates who joined their companies have the capacity to learn. According to the results of the inferential analysis, there is a substantial positive correlation between the importance of Soft Skills in organisations and the Soft Skills that can be acquired at the organisations (: .553). There is no connection between graduates' Soft Skills and the importance of Soft Skills in organisations (: .139), and the graduates' Soft Skills and the Soft Skills learned at the organisations show a moderately good association (: .262). According to the findings, organisations provide learning opportunities for employees that are relevant to their organisations. The findings also support the claim made by the employers that graduates lack Soft Skills. This study focuses on the Soft Skills needed for employment in the services and manufacturing sectors and is significant because it encourages additional collaborations between educational institutions and industries to provide students with the practical experiences they need for future employment.