Graduates’ Employability through the University Entrepreneurship Curriculum Implementation: The Malaysian Context

Unemployment among Malaysian graduates has become a grievous issue, which attracts serious debates at several intellectual forums, seminars, conferences and other intellectual platforms. The concerned parties are government, academics, non-governmental agencies, academics and others. The issue makes other countries to question the Malaysian educational system and extensively affects the Malaysia’s vision of becoming developed country in 2025 (Ekpe, 2017). Thus, Malaysian government has identified three measures that could help to tackle the problem of unemployment among graduates. One, reforming the curricula to ensure quality and training. This was highlighted by the Prime Minister in his Budget speech in 2013. Second, the recent implementation of “1 Malaysia Training Scheme (SLIM) in 2011. Third, reforming the higher education curricula to stimulate the students’ mind set towards entrepreneurship (Bin Yusuf, Zainol & Bin Ibrahim, 2015; Bustamam & Abdul Halit, 2016). Nevertheless, the recent statistics (December, 2012-January, 2013), portray high level of unemployment among the graduates at the rate of 2.4 percent; and relatively signifies that graduates in Malaysia do not participate much in SLIM (Shamsuddin & Mohamed Mahfol, 2013; Statistics Labour Force, 2013).