Employment issues need 'urgent action'

STAKEHOLDERS will need to act urgently to tackle Brunei's employment issues once the Centre for Strategic and Policy Studies (CSPS) completes its first graduate unemployment study.

CSPS Board of Directors Chairman Dato Paduka Hj Murni Hj Mohamed said it is imperative to address graduate unemployment and potential job mismatches.

"It is urgent, that's why we are addressing it.

"If you know our parallel endeavours at the moment, the study of land use, and then beyond that, we are looking at manpower forecasting, and the sort of cluster of activities that are going to be promoted by Brunei, all this is a part of employment apart from the land use (study)," he explained.

He said after the land use optimisation is completed, Brunei will require the human resources to fulfil the requirements of investors who come to develop industries in the Sultanate.

"Now we are training the so-called manpower, but after they graduate they don't know where to go. They are not properly employed, and this is a concern," said Dato Hj Murni.

"We would like to use these findings and data to help our (overall) study," he said.

The chairman said taking measures cannot be done alone. "We have our stakeholders, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Education, all this is inter-related, you cannot do this in isolation."

He pointed out that the graduate employment study that is being carried out is similar to the CSPS energy and land use studies. Each study has its relevant stakeholders, "so that at the end of the day the ownership will be theirs and we implement it together".

Dr Diana Cheong, CSPS senior researcher at CSPS, said the graduate unemployment study will give some insight whether Brunei is suffering from "Diploma Disease".

"It is well recognised abroad, there is some social frustration when people are trained for a particular job but the actual job they get is devalued, there might be a mismatch or they are underpaid," she said, adding that this may not necessarily be the case in Brunei.

"This is the case in a lot of countries, but that is why we are conducting the study," she said. "Right now it is just assumptions, but CSPS's role is to gather empirical data to substantiate such assumptions," said Dr Cheong during a press conference.

"Diploma Disease", a term coined by Ronald Dore, is a phenomenon where people believe that the more is invested in education, the higher the chances of climbing the social ladder and getting a better job.

CSPS has already begun calling Brunei's scholarship students from the previous four years, but also welcome Bruneian graduates who are not registered with the Ministry of Education scholarship scheme.

"We would like to study employment issues among students too," said Dr Cheong, who encouraged them to the CSPS website and Facebook to fill the questionnaire.

"Over the last four years, the scholarship students amounted to about 4,000 from both UBD and abroad," said Dr Cheong.

"We will take a proper statistically representative sample from there to interview later on, after the questionnaire, we will take a smaller sample of unemployed that we've identified and hold a proper forecast interview with them to get a more qualitative and rigid study," she explained.

After finishing the interpretation of data, CSPS will share the results and findings in a bigger forum with employers from the private and public sectors.

Dr Cheong said the questionnaire is confidential and graduates must understand that it is to make better policies on employment, thus benefiting the country.

"The calling and questionnaire stage will last another month, we would like all the graduates to fill in the questionnaire before the end of July," said Dr Cheong.

"For those who are unemployed, or who feel that they would like to participate, we encourage them to fill in, even if they are graduates from five or six years ago," she said.

The Brunei Times