Memories of a Traveler

Salaam and Greetings, In today’s New Straits Times, they reported on the upcoming registration for universities in Malaysia. And that the gender gap is now 60:40, in favor of the ladies. In 1990, it was a milestone when it hit 50:50. Prior to that, it has always been more men that ladies. UKM reported, this year, they will be having a ratio of 70:30 for the ladies. What brought upon this drastic gap? According to UKM Deputy Vice-Chancellor (student affairs and alumni) Prof Dr Othman A. Karim, “ More female applicants had better academic results and performance, which explains the increase in the gender gap. ” Read more: University gender gap http://www.nst.com.my/nst/articles/Universitygendergap/Article/#ixzz1XJy2xJHM However, the statement by Prof Dr Othman only begs the question, “why are the ladies having better academic results than their men counterpart?” A few days ago, I wrote about the challenges many countries are facing on the education system, including Malaysia. A c...

Salaam and Greetings to All, Before the Hair Raya break, I read a similar thing mentioned by the Chairman of Google on the challenges faced by UK education system. You can read the article here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education . And I believe, Malaysia is not spared from that challenges too.  As a learning & development person, I am always faced with the challenges of raising demands by bosses on the lack of knowledge, and competencies by employees. These group of employees I roughly figured are around the mid 30s and below age group. They are the product of our ever changing education system. Being a former teacher and lecturer I learned that our education system is so content driven. Yet, the work place requires process driven knowledge, such as thinking skills, creative thinking, problem solving, communication skills, writing skills, making connections etc. There is clearly a disjoint between the two. How can we res...