The report that there were currently 80,000 jobless graduates in the country caused quite a bit of alarm among some quarters, enough to set in motion HR retraining schemes and other remedial actions to rectify the growing problem.

But it seems that it is false alarm after all.

There are only 18,070 graduates that are jobless and not 80,000 as reported earlier, clarified Datuk Mustapha Mohamed, Minister in the Prime Minister?s Department.

This figure, he said, was only 5% of the total 350,000 unemployed in the country which consisted of diploma, SPM holders and Form Five dropouts. The bulk of the unemployed are made up of the unskilled and those who did not even reach Form Five level. Of the unemployed graduates, last year?s statistics of 23,710 were from the third quarter and most of this number had already found jobs this year. In fact, the unemployment rate of graduates registered a drop of 1% in the fourth quarter of 2004. This meant that the problem wasn?t such a big one.

Malaysia?s unemployment rate is amongst the world?s lowest, against Germany?s 12%, France?s 9.9% and Japan?s 4.5%, says Mustapha, and this shows that the government?s initiatives to address the problem was bearing fruit. However, he did acknowledge that there was a problem and pledged there would be top priority effort made to overcome it.

To assist in this effort, Mustapha said the department would be releasing monthly reports to enable the government to act fast.

In a related development on the same issue, UMNO Youth has developed Program Pintar to help overcome the problem of jobless graduates. To kick-start the programme, it has offered 100 students the chance to train at several government-linked companies and multinational corporations, the objective being to provide students from institutions of higher learning, the skills, exposure and experience of real working environments so that they would be relevantly equipped once the graduate.