Telenor Group, the largest shareholder in Digi, today released the results of a pilot online survey across six nations in Asia, including Malaysia, assessing millennials’ attitudes about their future career, technology’s impact and the skills they need to be best prepared for the jobs of tomorrow.
The results indicate that Malaysia’s young adults know the importance of technology, yet believe that career success requires both technical and human skills, even if results show that 100% of respondents think robots in the workplace will be a part of our future.
The majority of Malaysians (55%) indicated that they knew that mobile/internet technology would be ‘very important,’ in their forthcoming careers. They mirrored the average of 63% of youth aggregated in all six nations, with 55% saying that mobile/internet technology will be ‘important’ in their career by 2020. However, Malaysia was unique from all surveyed nations in that 33% said they felt ‘cool’ rather than ‘excited’ about future job opportunities in the internet and digital sectors. Matching this sentiment was respondents in Singapore (43%). In contrast, 49% on average from all other nations said they were ‘excited,’ with 69% in Myanmar at the highest end of the scale.
Malaysia was the only country to say technical expertise will be most important for jobs of the future. Of the surveyed Malaysians, 24% stated that tech-related ‘mobile and web development, and super coding skills,’ were the most significant for their job-seeking age group. Conversely, the highest numbers of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi youth maintained that the most important skills for a great future job will be the ‘ability to inspire others, and leadership capability’ (37%, 36%, 34% respectively). More than one in four of the surveyed Singaporean youth regarded ‘people management and emotional intelligence’ as the most crucial (27%). Nearly one in three Myanmar youth leaned toward ‘creativity, cognitive flexibility’ (29%).
All of the Malaysian youth surveyed agreed that robots will replace humans in many future professions, as did all the participating countries. On which jobs robots would most likely replace humans in, 44% of Malaysian respondents predicted that the manufacturing and engineering industries would see the most machine takeovers. 17% of Malaysians say that the proliferation of robots should definitely be a consideration for millennials when job hunting in the future. The other surveyed nations were united with this sentiment that robots will replace humans in the manufacturing or engineering sectors with Bangladesh matching Malaysia at 44%, forty-one percent of surveyed in Myanmar agreed, followed by 38% in Singapore and India, and 34% in Pakistan.
When youths were asked to describe the qualities that best encapsulate themselves as young thinkers and students, youth in Malaysia (24%) were aligned with Singapore (32%) and Bangladesh (26%), saying they were ‘compassionate with a sense of justice and a desire to protect.’ In comparison, the largest group in Pakistan (24%) described themselves as armed with ‘strategic vision and big-picture mindsets.’ Whereas most in Myanmar (30%) and India (24%) stated they were ‘highly creative, intuitive thinkers.’
Malaysia’s millennials finally said it was the more human aspects of technology that appealed to them currently, with 27% of Malaysians and 31% of Singaporeans and saying that the best thing about the internet is that it ‘connects us to all kinds of people and ideas.’
Youth in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and India all agreed with the statement: ‘It’s important to understand all kinds of technology – I want to know as much as I can!’ with Myanmar topping the scale at 34% of respondents.
The multi-market ‘Jobs of the Future’ survey obtained 4,200 respondents aged 15 to 25, in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Singapore, India, Myanmar and Pakistan. It was conducted via targeting through the Telenor Group Facebook with a sample size of 700 secondary school, or university students per market used in the results analysis.
