KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 10): Human Resources Minister Steven Sim said some 600,000 workers in the country will require training within the next three to five years to help them transition into new economy roles.
The affected workers who require reskilling, upskilling, or cross-skilling are mostly in labour-intensive industries such as wholesale and retail trade as well as food manufacturing and services, he said at a briefing on Thursday.
To address this requirement, Sim said the ministry will announce several measures including incentives for workers to take up skills training courses that will enable them to fill up the emerging jobs of the future.
"We will help them [the workers] by providing different incentive schemes so that they can be channelled to the relevant skill courses which will enable them to take up future jobs, whether you are current workers, or students, or Malaysians in general," he said.
This, among other findings, was from a study by state-owned Talent Corporation Malaysia Bhd in collaboration with the ministry to prepare Malaysia's workforce for the economy influenced by artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation and the green economy.
The 10 sectors covered in the study are information and communication technology, food, pharmaceutical manufacturing, aerospace, electrical and electronics, wholesale and retail trade, chemicals, medical devices, energy and power, and global business services.
The study, which began in March, was completed in September. The full report of the study will be launched in November, Sim said.
"We took the initiative to come up with this [report] to show the roadmap and the perspective of the future,” he said. “We are definitely going to work with other ministries to ensure that it is a whole of government approach and a whole of society approach.”
The study also found that there will be 60 new types of jobs that will be emerging across the 10 sectors within the next three to five years, including AI engineer, data engineer, data scientist, and sustainability engineer.
Some of the emerging roles include drone pilot, autonomous operator, live host, and bot trainer.
"All these tasks and roles... are all from the councils we have for each sector, of which 60% are industry players,” Sim noted. “So they gave us a picture of how their industry will change in the next three to five years.”
The ministry and TalentCorp will also continue its study on the impact of AI, digitalisation, and the green economy on 13 more sectors within the next six months to a year.
The objective of the study is to inform stakeholders of the policies and strategies for future workforce planning, providing a roadmap for navigating workforce transformations driven by emerging technologies and green initiatives.
The study is also to identify skill gaps and align educational programmes with future needs. The target audience of the report, Sim said, includes policy makers, investors, small and medium-sized enterprises, workers, and university students.