Not a Sim-ulation

The Star

Human Resources Minister Steven Sim is looking at how the ministry can improve the welfare of workers and their skills and increase the workforce's overall productivity.  WATCH MORE: https://thestartv.com/c/news SUBSCRIBE: https://cutt.ly/TheStar LIKE: https://fb.com/TheStarOnline

Transcript

00:00 Steven Sim was promoted to be the Human Resources Minister in December last year after his previous

00:07 roles as Deputy Minister in both the Finance and Youth and Sports Ministries. In an interview

00:11 with The Star, he said his experience in the previous portfolios has helped him to undertake

00:15 his current role.

00:16 Steven Sim, Human Resources Minister, Human Resources Ministry

00:17 Whenever you come to a new ministry, definitely there is a learning curve involved. I think

00:21 in my situation, we have to hit the ground running. I have to come to the ministry the

00:25 day of the announcement. When I went to MOF, it was the same thing. We had a very helpful

00:31 and experienced team of civil servants who are there to assist us. My experience actually

00:36 helped me to understand how the civil service, how the government mechanism operates. Youth

00:42 and Sports also prepared me to be more engaging with the grassroots, which is very useful

00:48 for this ministry because this ministry is about the workforce. So that gives me a perspective

00:52 on how do you improve the livelihood of the workers. You can only do that when you interact

00:56 and engage with them.

00:57 Steven Sim said he wants to focus on improving the welfare of the workers and their skills,

01:02 increasing the workforce's overall productivity and formulating a national human resource

01:06 policy.

01:07 The things that we have done in the past 100 days represents our direction. We have launched

01:11 several initiatives. For example, Perkeso for Homemakers for Housewives. We are going

01:15 to do improvements this year. For example, raising the age of eligibility from 55 years

01:20 old to 60 years old. We have also increased some of the benefits under this scheme. We

01:25 talk about 10,000 mental health first aider in workplaces and then 100,000 free health

01:31 screening for workers in Malaysia or over the country. In terms of training, HRDCorp

01:36 has signed an MOU with 13 top global training providers. Employers now can actually use

01:44 their HRDCorp levy to pay for training via these platforms. Employers can use up to 50%

01:52 of their levy balance in HRDCorp to upgrade in-house training infrastructures, including

01:58 to buy IT equipments like laptops, etc. We want to do training differently. We want to

02:04 do training radically. And then programme ILHAM, 30 million matching grant provided

02:10 by Kusuma to assist especially SMEs to implement paid internship programmes. We hope that smaller

02:17 companies, especially local SMEs, can take opportunity of this matching grant and therefore

02:22 providing a bigger internship opportunity for students all over the country. We are

02:26 saying that no one is too small. We are saying that we want to protect workers at every level.

02:33 Sim also said that the government will be announcing the framework of the National Human

02:37 Resource Policy later in May. In the meantime, a portal has been launched to allow Malaysians

02:42 to give feedback on the upcoming policy and he said when policies and decisions are made,

02:47 all stakeholders will be engaged by the Ministry.

02:49 Thank you.

02:50 [End of Audio]

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