Employability skills for Fresh Graduates from the Perspective of Malaysian Employers

Industrial revolution 4.0 (IR4) has quickly shifted the skill sets required in the workplace and employability skills are the elements employers demand from the fresh graduates. Given this shift in skill sets, it is important to determine whether employability skills will affect the recruitment-base decisions of employers with respect to fresh graduates. The focus towards employability skills in this study was directed towards information competencies, system competencies and technology competencies which were adopted and modified from the SCANS (1991) model. The population of this study is the person in charge who make decision in recruitment, which are employers in Malaysia. Member of Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) are invited to be the respondents and this research paper is specifically focusing on manufacturing sector employers. A self-administered questionnaire was employed as the data collection instrument, also adopting a purposive sampling method to collect and analyse the data and hypotheses were formulated and tested in order to achieve the aim of the study. The findings of this study demonstrated that employability skills have a significant positive relationship on recruitment-based decisions, implicating that manufacturing employers need to assess the employability skills of fresh new graduates when making recruitment-based decisions. The results of the descriptive analysis also demonstrated that all three specific employability skills were essential in the context of fresh new graduates as well based on the views and opinions of manufacturing employers. Additionally, technology competencies were perceived as the main employability skill that employers seek when recruiting fresh new graduates.