By: Ryan Carroll, Country Director, Randstad Malaysia

public infrastructure driving Malaysian CPE industry forward

Construction, property and engineering continue to show strong growth in a slow global economic environment with major projects, both in property development and public infrastructure, continuing to make headway. Major projects such as the Signature Tower, KL118, Bandar Malaysia, Tun Razak Exchange, MRT2, The DASH Highway and the new KL to Singapore High Speed Rail are creating jobs and driving strong demand for talent across various disciplines including Quantity Surveyors, Project Managers and M&E Engineers.

digital strategies creating demand for technology talent

The technology industry continues to surge forward as organizations across the globe rush to adopt new digital strategies to combat digital disruption and Malaysia is no different. Discussions with leaders of organizations in Malaysia have revealed that most are looking at projects to integrate technology into their processes or products to stay ahead of the competition. Moving into 2017, two key trends have emerged.

Firstly, larger organizations are scrambling to take technology headcount in-house to drive their digital strategies. This has created a large boost in the demand for skilled tech talent, at Randstad Malaysia, we’ve seen a +200% growth in roles that come into the Technology practice just in 2016.

Secondly, the technology skill gap continues to increase as technological advances outpaces the speed of current training programmes. To close this gap, successful organizations need to include specialized training and development budgets to upskill their own workforce to tackle organizational digital strategies.

malaysian businesses turning to contracting

Businesses in Malaysia will continue to utilize contracting to meet their hiring needs in 2017 as the benefits to both employees and workers become clearer. The slow economy has led many organizations to face hiring restrictions, with contracting being a simple way to tackle this issue and ensure that key projects have sufficient manpower required. In addition, contracting is being used as a way to try out multiple candidates with different skill sets before making a full time hiring decision. At Randstad Malaysia, we’ve seen an increase of contract hires by 300% specifically in the technologies space in the past year.

Contract roles are also starting to have less of a stigma attached to them for Malaysian job-seekers. The flexibility offered with contract roles and the ability to work on projects for a wide range of different organizations is a strong draw for candidates looking to grow their resume.

demand for risk and compliance specialists

Banking and finance continues to show growth in certain business functions for example risk, compliance and operations. As organisations globally look to improve productivity, specialist skillsets are required and Malaysia is no different in this regard.

With the increased number of fraud and money-laundering cases reported in Malaysia, we are seeing a continued demand in banking roles such as Risk Managers, Auditors and AML professionals to oversee the operations in financial organizations and can help mitigate cyber risks.

more focus put on EVP and employee engagement

With retention continuing to be high on the agenda for most organisations, our HR division has seen an influx of roles starting the year focussing on people engagement and EVP development.

If millennials are a key target for talent, and it likely is, employers and organisations need to ensure that their employee value proposition (EVP) caters for this. Young people are looking for jobs that gives them a sense of meaning and a better work-life balance.

Besides providing great benefits, understanding what motivates and inspires any employee is the key to maintaining their engagement and organisations which have an EVP catering to this will have a better chance at retaining their talent.

We look forward to share the 2nd edition of our Randstad Award and employer branding report on top trends that will define the recruitment industry in 2017.

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