Attracting Talent

The issue of attracting and retaining talented people has been a key concern among Fortune 500 companies and is now trickling down to universities, governments and other smaller companies. Talented people are becoming more important as countries and companies move towards a 'knowledge-based' economy. Malaysia has pretensions of wanting to become a knowledge based economy and our leaders would do well to read the latest Economist survey on Global Talent.

From the Economist survey:

With opportunities at home running dry, the hunt for talent has gone global. Over the past decade multinational companies have shipped back-office and IT operations to the developing world, particularly India and China. More recently they have started moving better jobs offshore as well, capitalising on high-grade workers with local knowledge; but now they are bumping up against talent shortages in the developing world too.

Even governments have got the talent bug. Rich countries have progressed from simply relaxing their immigration laws to actively luring highly qualified people. Most of them are using their universities as magnets for talent. India and China are trying to entice back some of their brightest people from abroad. Singapore's Ministry of Manpower even has an international talent division.

I completely agree with Tony when he says that we have a very poor track record of optimizing talent especially compared with our neighbors down south. We also have a very poor track record of maximizing our talent by sending them out to the best schools, attracting them back to Malaysia and then retaining them in local GLCs by optimizing their talent. (When I say "we", I'm referring to the government and the government-linked companies)

Tony's earlier post on the NEP and education referred to Tunku's Aziz remark of not even meeting one Malay student when he was giving a talk in Harvard. I think we have a very poor track record of sending our students to top schools in the US regardless of race. On a per capita basis, Singapore sends a much higher number of government scholars to the top US universities. Indeed, in some of these schools, the number of Singaporeans outnumber the Malaysians, by a margin of 5 to 1, if not more. There are approximately 50 Singapore undergrads here at Duke (most of them government scholars) compared to approximately 10 Malaysian undergrads (half of them are government scholars).

The success of Singapore's junior colleges is such that it warranted a special mention in the aforementioned Economist survey.

One of the most successful schools at getting students into American Ivy League universities is Raffles Junior College in Singapore.

(Disclaimer: Both Tony and I went to RJC or Raffles Junior College for our A levels)

I understand that JPA is making efforts at getting more of our scholars into top US universities by having specialised programs for its scholars but we're probably 10 years behind Singapore.

In terms of attracting talent to Malaysia, we don't have an equivalent of Singapore's Ministry of Manpower. While Singapore is reaching out to hire talented foreigners, we're having problems attracting qualified Malaysians who have studied and / or worked abroad to return home. And even when these Malaysians return home, they usually are channelled into the private sector without having the opportunity to 'serve' in the public sector or GLCs in any meaningful way.

In terms of optimizing talent, I've heard so many stories of JPA scholars who return home and wait 6 months before being 'called up' by them. Many of these scholars hope that JPA 'can't find' a job for them so that they can be released from their bonds. There's no systematic program within the JPA to effectively channel and manage their scholars. From what Tony has said, it's probably the same for the Tenaga, Telekom and Petronas scholars as well (though my impression is that Petronas probably has a better HR management program).

If we're really serious about moving into a knowledge economy, we need a serious rethink about how we manage the most important resource in a knowledge economy which is our human resource.