INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: THE OUM EXPERIENCE
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Date
2014-02-14
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Widyatama International Seminar
Abstract
A high income nation requires a highly skilled
workforce with adequate competencies to trigger the
innovation-led growth and promote productivity. As
today’s world of work includes mergers and acquisitions,
rapid market fluctuations and other turbulences, the
workforce needs to upgrade their basic educational base to
be able to respond to the emerging needs of a high income
nation. No longer an employee can have a lifetime
employment in a single company. The workforce needs to
polish their professional skills in addition to its current
technical skills which can be developed through
continuous education. Only then, they will have a hollistic
development of both professional and technical skills
which enable them to help increase productivity. The
changing demands of the markets put pressure on the
workforce to learn new skills at an accelerating pace.
As Malaysia is moving towards realizing the vision
of 2020 to become a fully developed nation, it becomes
more crucial to have a first class workforce with these key
characteristics – higher education qualifications, welldeveloped
skills in technical and profesional fields and
increased productivity. In other words, to achieve a firstclass
workforce status, the workforce needs a culture of
lifelong learning that allows for updating their existing
skills as the society and world of work evolve with time.
For Malaysia, the massive transformation of higher
education is a national agenda to ensure that Malaysia’s
higher education is of high quality.
Open University Malaysia, the premier open and
distance learning institution in Malaysia, has always been
sentimental in inculcating the lifelong learning culture in
the society. The role of open and distance learning in
propogating the lifelong learning culture has become more
prevalent in the modern society as it offers an alternative
pathway for the existing workforce to upgrade their
educational background.
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Keywords
INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS, Higher Education Institutions