Perodua Youth Training Programme

These days, the paths of most people’s lives have the tendency of following an eerily fixed pattern. You’re born. You grow up. You go to school, tuition, college, and eventually university. After three to four years in university, you are then expected to come away with a degree, printed in some fancy cert and presented in some fancy ceremony. With that degree cert, you then go hunting for some nice desk job, climb the corporate ladder, retire, and wait to die. Of course in the midst of all that, you would also need to find your other half, get married, have children, and raise them to go through exactly that same cycle you went through.

It is a vicious cycle, and if you just so happen to drop out of it anywhere along the line, your are almost automatically deemed a failure. If you score say four As from nine subjects in SPM, that’s no longer an achievement. You are asked what happened to the other five. Every Tom, Dick and Harry goes into university these days, and the saying is that, if you don’t have a uni degree, you don’t get a job. As a result, people no longer go to university these days for knowledge, they go for the sole purpose of getting a degree, just so they can find a job when they graduate.

This has led us into a very unhealthy culture. Educational institutions serve no longer as alcoves of knowledge, but as factories of graduates. A degree is no longer a prestige, it’s a necessity. During my father’s days, an SPM graduate can walk into any job. These days, you’re not guaranteed a modest living even if you’re a degree holder. I do not view this as a positive development, as it sidelines too many people whose talents are present, but simply not inline with the rigours of academia. Due to our overwhelming need to conform to the system, we often narrow our sight and fail to see the big picture when it comes to charting our paths in life. There are routes to success that do not involve a bachelors degree in law, or medicine, or engineering.

Though certainly not as glamourous as a place in university, the Perodua Youth Training Programme (PYTP) offers SPM school leavers an alternative in their education options. Yearly, some 40 students are inducted into a six-month in-house training course under the programme, and are coached with basic technical training which would enable them to pick up the Sijil Kemahiran Malaysia 1 (SKM 1) cert.

Just recently, a batch of 25 students completed the programme. Speaking at the graduation ceremony for the 25, Perodua MD En Aminar Rashid Salleh said, “The youths armed with the SKM 1 certification are now certified semi-skilled workers. They can either opt to work or continue their studies.”

Aminar further added that most graduates of the PYT Programme receive offers of employment from Perodua to work as assistant mechanics, assistant body repairer, or assistant spray painters.

Participation in the programme, when it was first opened in 1999 was limited only to youthsliving in Gombak and Hulu Selangor, though Perodua were finally persuaded to open the doors to youths nationwide come 2007. In total, the programme has seen the graduation of 270 students since its inception.

“We received some 400 applications from youths all over the country to undergo the programme every year. This programme forms part of our corporate responsibility in addressing the socio-economic problems faced by school leavers from relatively poor familers, ” Aminar added.

KON