Labour market information: The Malaysian scene

• Main Authors: Ab Hamid, Kamal, Mohamed Udin, Zulkifli, Zulhumadi, Faisal
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: HD28 Management. Industrial Management; T Technology (General)
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/4208/1/KaM.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/4208/; http://cob.uum.edu.my/ictom
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

As generally known, the demand for labour comes from employers and is derived from their needs and requirements to produce goods and services. It is normal industry practice that firms choose their staffing levels according to a number of factors, including the cost of labour, the productivity of the workforce, the current and anticipated level of production, and the price that each firm can command for its output. More to the point, this paper addresses the initial start toward developing a comprehensive system containing information that would help in the decision-making activities of the organisation. However, it must be stressed here that the prototype developed for this research, which is the output of this research, is just a database and not a system per se. Throughout the survey period, there were a total of 983 companies that responded to the survey. Out of these, several sets of returned questionnaires were either not comprehensively completed, or not usable for this study. Out of these 983 companies, only a total of 968 company demographic information was captured into the database. Finally, for this research, the establishment of Labour Market Information (LMI) database was a very challenging task since information on labour market were initially still too large. Activities like identifying effective information and analysing them were very excruciating since there was no proper foundation yet to exist in the local environment during the early stage. Even though the LMI database put forward from this research is quite efficient in describing designated relationships, it is still a prototype that can be further improved to meet the ever changing labour environment in this country.