Malaysia is the 3rd Most Attractive Country to Work for in Asia, Beating Japan, China & Taiwan
The World Talent Ranking for 2018 by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), a Switzerland-based business school has ranked Malaysia at the 22nd place in the world overall, which means we have moved up six places compared to last year. Go, Malaysia!
This ranking means that Malaysia has beaten Taiwan (27), Japan (29), China (39), the UAE (26) and even the United Kingdom (23). The study was done involving 63 countries and Malaysia was at number 28 in 2017. This year, Switzerland takes the first place followed by Denmark and Norway. Singapore comes in at 13th place, just one spot below the US while Hong Kong is in 18th place.
This ranking is based on “the status and development of competencies necessary for enterprises and the economy to achieve long-term value creation. It does so by using a set of indicators which measure the development, retention and attraction of a domestic and international highly-skilled workforce,” IMD said. The three main categories that were taken into consideration during the ranking are namely; investment and development, appeal, and readiness. IMD explained that Malaysia’s ranking had improved mainly due to investment in education, which in turn helped develop the local skilled workforce.
Neighbouring countries are ranked lower than Malaysia with Thailand coming in at 42nd place, Indonesia at 45 and the Phillippines at 55. In Asia, Malaysia is in the third place with Singapore topping the chart followed by Hong Kong in second place.
That said, Malaysia managed to surpass the US, Japan, France, Korea, UK and even Singapore in terms of investment and development of home-grown talent, by coming in at number 17. Singapore was ranked number 34.
For the category of whether an educational system meets the needs of a competitive economy, Malaysia comes in at 31. Malaysia ranked 24 for whether science is adequately emphasised in schools. In addition, for government expenditure on education per student, Malaysia ranked 31. Yet, Malaysia has a rather low rank of 41 for Programmes for International Students Assessments or PISA, an evaluation of how good a country’s pupils are in mathematics, science and reading.
IMD has been assessing the economies of these 63 countries since 2014 and assessing how they develop, attract and retain highly-skilled professionals over the years. They added, “The 2018 edition of the IMD World Talent Ranking confirms the trends we identified in the past: the most successful countries in talent competitiveness are mainly European, mid-size economies, with high levels of investment in education and quality of life. Furthermore, results suggest that the wealth of the country is not the only significant driver of talent competitiveness. In fact, indicators of social progress, as well as the quality of institutions (e.g., adherence to the rule of law), are a strong foundation for attracting highly skilled professionals from the international talent pool.”
