Malaysian Graduates Employability Challenges: A Critical Review

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching implications for individuals, societies, and economies, disrupting established patterns in education, employment, and career trajectories. This paper explores a narrative review of the literature that studied the graduates’ employability post pandemic. Narrative review is suitable to be applied in this study, as it tends to achieve exploratory research where a new or emerging field is explored, providing holistic perspective in which a wide range of studies is summarized, consequently synthesizing diverse evidence that highlight the trends across various studies. This review highlights the multifaceted challenges facing Malaysian graduates, emphasizing the far-reaching circumstance of the COVID-19 pandemic on graduates' employment dynamics. It underscores disparities in the quality of employment, wage gaps, and the vulnerability of workers in informal sectors. A range of factors impacting employability can be considered, including self-efficacy, curriculum support, employability skills development, and work placement learning. The study also explores the impact of postgraduate studies on employment prospects, gender disparities in employability skills, and the significance of soft skills and non-technical skills in aviation careers. Furthermore, it delves into how graduates' knowledge and soft skills development vary by education level and how emerging concepts like Industry 5.0 are reshaping the employment landscape. Confronting globalization and evolving labor market dynamics, graduates must embrace self-development and adaptability so forth meeting the changing needs of the job market.