Lending a helping hand
SMALL and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Malaysia’s economy, forming the majority of local businesses.
According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM), 98.5% of total businesses in Malaysia are SMEs of which 693,670 firms are micro, 192,783 firms are small and 20,612 are medium-sized firms that bring up the total of SMEs in Malaysia to 907,065 firms.
It quoted in the report that the growth of SMEs will help Malaysia realise its vision in becoming a fully industrialised, high-income nation in 2020 through the increase to the overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from 36.3% in 2015 to 41.0% in 2020.
With every other business being an SME, business owners are bound to face tough competition and they need to continually scale, innovate and adapt to changes as they grow.
Intervention programmes
For this to happen, businesses need the fund to support their training needs and help them analyse the skills required by the employees and to diagnose organisational gaps that may impact scalability and more importantly, productivity and address them accordingly through the right intervention programmes.
“It is alarming to note that approximately 70% of workers in Malaysia are not covered by any structured training funds or programmes,” said Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF) chief executive Datuk C.M. Vignaesvaran Jeyandran.
“The truth is the competitiveness of every business depends on the capacity of their talent to innovate and upgrade.”
HRDF is an agency under the Human Resources Ministry that works to inculcate training culture in private companies through the management of their training fund and by being a one-stop consultative centre for training needs analysis. To date,
Our mission is to catalyse the development of a competent Malaysian workforce – one that is effective, efficient, productive and innovative and helping the Government to achieve our end goal of becoming an advanced and inclusive nation by the year 2020.
HRDF has close to 20,000 registered local employers with over two million Malaysian employees covered under its Pembangunan Sumber Manusia Berhad Act 2001.
Enhancing the Malaysian SMEs
HRDF has made it easy for SMEs to have access to funding and resources. To ease the process, it also runs Training Needs’ Analysis to determine the problems faced by SMEs and match them with suitable training programmes.
Together with other existing programmes driven by HRDF, Vignaesvaran is confident HRDF will collectively serve several objectives to reduce Malaysia’s dependency on foreign workers in semi-skilled and skilled areas of work, reduce unemployment rate and related social ills, increase local household income as well as national income per capita and to produce skilled Malaysian workers for employers with businesses in our country.
Through the mandate given by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, HRDF introduced several human capital strategic programmes in 2015 to boost Malaysian employers’ capabilities in up-skilling, reskilling and retraining their current employees. From the fund allocated for the programmes, close to 10,000 Malaysian employees have been up-skilled or assisted for the job placement.
Vignaesvaran added, “To identify training gaps within an SME, the right profiling tools have to be put in place and HRDF has developed it for SMEs to use for free. We call it MyFuture Diagnostic Tool.”
MyFuture is a SME Competency Profiling Tool developed to address the growing concerns on the effectiveness, timeliness and impact of SME training and development programmes. MyFuture puts its core focus on analysing SME’s HR processes and systems across several functions.
MyFuture uses the HR Maturity Model to analyse HR processes and identify where the business currently stands. There are four levels of maturity that businesses will likely experience:
Level 1 – There are absolutely no HR policies or processes in place altogether.
Level 2 – There are basic HR policies and functions in practice.
Level 3 – All HR functions are formalised. Level 4 – HR drives business.
To date, over 1,000 companies have taken part in MyFuture 1.0 and HRDF is set for a positive outlook for a growing number of participation with the introduction of MyFuture 2.0 in August this year.
HRDF brings it all together
Over the past 20 years of its establishment, HRDF has gone from good to great and been acknowledged by various big players domestically and internationally as an organisation with Excellence In Industry Class And Training And Development for 2015 and 2016 by Dewan Perniagaan Melayu Malaysia, 2015’s HR Leader Of The Year by Malaysian Institute Of Human Resource Management (MIHRM), Best HRD Practice for 2016 by IFTDO and a few more.
“Our mission is to catalyse the development of a competent Malaysian workforce – one that is effective, efficient, productive and innovative and helping the Government to achieve our end goal of becoming an advanced and inclusive nation by the year 2020,” said Vignaesvaran.
For more information on HRDF, log on to www.hrdf.com.my.