Malaysia: targeted academic development needed

Abstract

Malaysia has a grand vision for its cadre of over 30,000 academics, serving over 1.3 million students across 20 public universities and over 400 private higher education institutions. Under an academic development framework called the Differentiated Career Pathway (DCP), academics are expected to possess baseline competencies in teaching, research, services, and management, after which they may focus to excel in any of the four personas: inspiring educator, accomplished researcher, experienced practitioner, or institutional leader. The main argument behind DCP is that a more focused career pathway will lead to greater motivation and career satisfaction among staff, which will then lead to a productive, highly performing academic workforce. As aspirational as it sounds, the DCP remains a complex framework to implement. To successfully embrace their preferred personas, Malaysian academics need to allocate additional time outside of their day-to-day tasks to hone their credentials. For example, an academic aiming for professional engineer status must undergo a period of supervised practical experience, prepare evidence for submission, and subsequently sit for an interview with the Institution of Engineers Malaysia (IEM). An overworked academic population simply cannot commit to the additional demands exerted on top of existing teaching, research, and service commitments. Each academic should have his/her individual development plan, yet academic development is done en masse. In-house training programmes cover generic themes and do not account for prior experiences and levels of mastery. External training requires additional training allocations, which might be hard to source in an already cash-strapped higher education setting. As a result, most academics do not fulfil the mandated 42 training hours per year. Ongoing initiatives jointly organised by the Higher Education Leadership Academy (AKEPT), Ministry of Higher Education, and academic developers of higher education institutions point to competency-based training based on level of mastery, which alleviates the gap to some extent. Additionally, findings from the 2019 iteration of the ‘Academic Profession in the Knowledge Society’ (APIKS) global study, of which Malaysia is a participating country, pointed to three gap areas. First, there is a gender crisis, as female academics rated their competencies much lower than their male counterparts. Next, despite education export being an important economic agenda for the country, Malaysian academics have weak authorship links with international co-authors and rated themselves low in terms of competencies for networking and securing external funding. Finally, the young academic population, defined