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JOB MARKET INSIGHTS REPORT

Technical Report · March 2020

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JOB MARKET INSIGHTS
REPORT

December 2019

Prepared By

Labour Market Data Section,

ILMIA
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

INTRODUCTION

Understanding the labour market in terms of demand, supply, patterns and trends are
essential for any country to remain economically competitive as changes in the
economy has a significant impact on the overall job market. In other words, rapid
economic growth caused by an increase in the demand for goods and services can
create a large number of new job opportunities for people looking for employment.

The 15th International Conference of Labour Statistician 1993 defined Job Vacancy as
"a 'vacant post' can be said to exist if an employer before or during the reference period
has taken concrete steps to find a suitable person to carry out a specific set of tasks
and would have taken on (entered into a job contract with) such a person if she/he had
been available during the reference period". In a simpler note, job vacancy refers to
the unmet demand of manpower that otherwise are available due to few reasons.
Vacancy commonly occur due to promotion, termination, resignation, demotion and
retirement within the organisations.

Job Vacancy indicators are useful to measure the changes in demand of manpower
over time. Further, these indicators can identify the emerging labour shortage and
skills for the occupation. These indicators can help operational use for relevant
education and training institution to revise and reassess the curriculum requirement
for identified jobs.

JOB VACANCY VS JOB CREATION

On 21 November 2019, Malaysia Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir had announced to

allocate RM6.5 billion
under the #MalaysiaKerja
to create job opportunities
for Malaysian in the next 5
years with the involvement
of various relevant
ministries. This means that
the government will focus
on creating new jobs for
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

the Malaysia labour market especially towards vulnerable groups such as the youth,
graduates and disable persons. Job creation is defined as new positions be made
available in the organisations due to numerous reason such as expansion of
companies, injection of new capital, stimulus fund by the government and increase
trade opportunities. Job creation will then contribute to the increase in the job
vacancies in the market.

DEVELOPMENT OF JOB MARKET INSIGHT

Most countries traditionally use an establishment survey to collect Job Vacancy

information. Canada for example, conduct quarterly Job Vacancy and Wage Survey
by using 100,000 establishments to complement the job vacancy statistics program.
United Kingdom and Australia on the on other hand combine job vacancy survey with
data extraction method to produce job vacancy indicators. However, the establishment
survey, while consistent, are very costly especially in sustaining the data collection in
longer terms. Moreover, the “survey fatigue syndrome” where numerous surveys are
distributed to similar establishments every year or quarter can cause incorrect
responses which can alter the government human capital planning. Furthermore, the
yearly and occasional vacancy reporting which depict lagged info may cause inefficient
human capital decision and responses.

Hence, analysing job opening listing from the online job portals have become another
alternative to collect the job vacancy information. Even though the number of job
vacancies advertised on job portals does not represents the overall demand, however,
the proportion is relatively high compared to the other sources and keeps on
increasing with the rapid technological advances, thus greater exposure of job seekers
to the Internet.

The development of big data expands the tools by populating the job vacancy info via
scraping on job posting on recruitment portals and employer websites. Many studies
related to job vacancy have relied totally on web-based job vacancy advertisements
and found the results reliable (Bilal et al, 2017).
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

The Job Market Insight1 is an experiment initiative by Institute of Labour Market

Information and Analysis (ILMIA) to build an automated data collection, mapping and
dissemination of information on job vacancy in Malaysia. This Job Market Insight
presented the important job vacancy indicators disaggregated by sector, required skills
and state which purpose are to educate and provide information on current job
vacancies to every interested individual in Malaysia.

1
Although the report and information from Job Market Insights are comprehensive, the information of
Job Openings do not represent the whole coverage of Job Openings in Malaysia. Other reliable source
such as mandatory registration of “Company Advertisement on Job Openings” may be required to
supplement the information, however, such source is currently not available at the moment. MASCO
2013 Category 9 (Elementary Workers) is excluded from this report due to the nature of the job and
Category 0 (Army) due to safety and non-availability information.
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

Pipeline: Development of Job Market Insights

The diagram above presents overall work pipeline in developing the job market
insights. ILMIA has taken advantage of the emerging technology such as Machine
Learning and Artificial Intelligence to create the big data analytics use case. As feature
in the diagram, the work flow for this development as below;

a) Identify requirements
Prior to developing any initiative, objective and requirement must be clearly
identified to ensure the successfulness of the project. ILMIA had identified the
goal, variables to be collected and data sources to gather the information
needed.
b) Web Crawler
For this purpose, web crawling would be the main tools of data extraction which
are gathered from four (4) popular and publicly accessible online job portals.
Web crawler is an algorithm model that are developed to read pages from
websites which usually aim for systematic data entry. Hence, four customised
web crawler tools are developed to crawl the information from these websites.
This web crawler is design to crawl daily new vacancy posting on the website
by using the posting date.
c) Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
AI refers to the ability of digital computer or robot to perform and imitate task
associated by human intelligence. ML is an application of AI where the system
is able perform specific task without using explicit program or algorithm. ILMIA
is utilising these technologies to perform these tasks;
 data extraction whereby the data received are in unstructured format
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

 refine text analytics for producing meaningful and readable for next step
analysis
 text classification whereby the readable value (in text format) will be
matched with the national standard classifications (e.g MASCO, MSIC,
Skills List and NEC); and
 deduplication of job posting according to the predefined rules and relevant
variables (60 days are used to measure the job posting duplication).
d) Human Verification
This step is one of utmost important especially when developing new algorithm
since human intervention is needed to ensure that the accuracy and data
quality. ILMIA will verify all the matching outputs to ensure that the ML mapping
model is performing effectively and correct way. This exercise is also important
to enhance the mapping accuracy in the ML.
e) Data Cleansing (Via Extract, Load, Transfer (ETL))
Adopting prudence, this output dataset will undergo another final verification
using the ETL method. The ETL method will be based on the predefined rules
by ILMIA, which replicate from the guideline during the development of data
collection initiatives under ILMIA’s Labour Market Information Data Warehouse
(LMIDW). This ETL method will also combine the JobsMalaysia Vacancy
datasets to this ML Vacancy datasets. This exercise will create finalised job
vacancy database that is stored in LMIDW.
f) Visualisation
The final job vacancy database then will be translated into readable format to
create graphical presentation using attractive and interactive visual elements in
user friendly format, which are powered by Tableau. This visualisation is called
the Job Market Insights.
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

JOB MARKET INSIGHTS VISUALISATIONS (WALK THROUGH)

ILMIA intend to present the visualisation in an effective and interactive communication
to their stakeholders and general public, Hence, the visualisations are designed in a
user- friendly interface that are powered by Tableau. There are 5 landing pages to
represent job market insight as below;

1) Home
Home represents the front
landing page of Job Market
Insight with brief explanatory
introduction. Homepage also
presents overall job vacancies
and number of companies for
that particular reporting quarter.
For Quarter 3, 2019, the job
openings are reported to be
154,354 within 17,315 companies.

2) Overview
Overview page describes
the overview of Top 5 for
each of main occupation
indicators (which will be
explained in detailed in the
subsequent tabs) such as
by Job Group (Malaysia
Standard Classification of
Occupation (MASCO 2013
4 – Digit), Industries
(Malaysia Standard Industrial Classification MSIC 1 Digit) and States. This
page also shows the 3- month number of job openings for that particular
quarter. The month of July, August and September are used as inception
reporting months for this first report. In general, the number of job vacancies
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

from July 2019 to September 2019 have small fluctuation from 53, 016 job
openings in July 2019 to slight decrease of 48, 436 in September 2019. For the
Quarter 3,2019, the Top 5 hottest jobs are Stationary Plant and Machine
Operators, followed by Advertising and Marketing Professionals, Waiters,
Accountants and Auditors and lastly, Building Frame and Related Trades
Workers. Manufacturing is the top hiring industry with 49,916 job openings
followed by Wholesale and Retail Trades (18,970) and Accommodation and
Food Services Activities (16,433). As for Top Hiring State, Selangor and Kuala
Lumpur top the chart with respective job openings at 41,851 and 23,859.

3) Job
Job landing page describes each
job profile (based on the MASCO
2013 4 – Digit) through relevant
disaggregated indicators. There
are 8 indicators presented in this
page such as common job title,
required skills, qualifications, field
of studies, states, sectors, job
types and job level. For Example,
in Quarter 3, 2019, vacancy post
for Accountants and Auditors at executive level typically requires applicants to
have a minimum Diploma in Finance and Accounting while possessing skills
such as accounting, finance and good command in English. Wholesale and
Retail and Manufacturing are the Top two (2) hiring industries and most of the
vacancies available are for full time positions.
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

4) Industry
Industry tab depicts the jobs
that are available within the 21
industries (based on MSIC
2008 1- Digit). Users are
provided filter option to review
the given indicators based on
the chosen industry. Users
are able to view Top 5 hottest
jobs, skills, hiring states and
field of studies based on each
industry. For instance, in
Quarter 3, 2019, Wholesale
and Retail industry is in high demand for Shop Sale Assistants and Advertising
and Marketing Professional which are captured by Top Hottest Job Chart.
Meanwhile, Selangor and Kuala Lumpur have the highest advertisement for this
industry. The top five (5) skills required (sectoral based) are Sales strategy,
English, Communication, Marketing and good customer service.

5) State

State page portrays the

density of jobs in each
state in Malaysia where
user can hover each state
to identify the number of
job openings for the
quarter. An interesting
feature of this page is user
can create visual
comparison of three (3)
states either by job title or industries. This comparison is crucial for certain users
to identify the availability of work in certain states. For example, users can
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

compare top hiring industries in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and Johor. Based on
these three states, Kuala Lumpur has more opening in service oriented
activities (Wholesale, Financial Services and Accommodations) while Johor
and Selangor has high openings in Manufacturing sector.

ADDRESSING GREEN JOBS WITHIN JOB MARKET INSIGHTS

According to ILO, the term “green job” refer to jobs which are sustained by economic
activities that are more environmentally sustainable than the conventional alternative
and which also offer working conditions that meet accepted standards of decent work.

Exhibit 1: Green Jobs in regards to Total Employment

According to National Geographic, 11 fastest growing green jobs globally are Urban
Growers, Water Quality Technicians, Clean Car Engineers, Recyclers, Natural
Scientists, Green Builders, Solar Cell Technicians, Green Design Professionals, Wave
Energy Producers, Wind Energy Workers and Biofuels Jobs.

Malaysia’s Transition to a Green Economy

The Green Technology Master Plan 2017-2030 (GTMP) is fundamentally an outcome

of the Eleventh Malaysia Plan (2016-2020) which has earmarked green growth as one
of six game changers altering the trajectory of the nation’s growth. The GTMP creates
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

a framework which facilitates the mainstreaming of green technology into the planned
developments of Malaysia while encompassing the four pillars set in the National
Green Technology Policy (NGTP) i.e. energy, environment, economy and social. This
report highlighted by 2020, Green Technology adoption in the five sectors are
expected to contribute around GDP RM12.7 billion which is 0.7% of national GDP
while the green investment and green jobs are estimated at about RM18.7 billion and
76,470 jobs respectively. Towards 2030, if Business as Usual continues, Green
Technology is expected to contribute around GDP RM27.9 billion which is still 0.7% of
national GDP and the green investment and green jobs are estimated at about
RM45.17 billion and 104,060 jobs respectively. (Source: GTMP 2017-2030 Report)

Snapshot on Green Jobs Demand Q3, 2019

Due to data constraint, estimating green jobs in Malaysia was done by identification
and classification of occupations in Malaysian Standard Classification of Occupation
2013 (MASCO 2013) that best fits the context of green jobs. There were 377 job titles
in MASCO 2013 identified as green jobs. Next, this list was used as a Master Library
to match job vacancy data in Job Market Insights.

Total Green Jobs vacancy identified in Job Market Insights for quarter 3, 2019 were
1,413 from 443 companies. The top 5 green jobs advertised were Hydrologist, Wood
Analyst, Beauty Salon Inspector, Field Farmer and Safety and Health Officer.
Meanwhile, Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles and
Other Services Activities were the sector with highest Green Jobs vacancies (288).
However, it should be noted that these generated statistics are only a proxy for green
job vacancies for this period and do not necessarily represent the current industry
demand.
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

Chart 1: Top 5 Green Job in Demand for Quarter 3, 2019

Chart 2: Top 5 Industries with Green Job Vacancies for Quarter 3, 2019

CONCLUSION
The availability of comprehensive and up-to-date labour market analysis is the
foundation for accurate and effective human capital policy and decision making. Thus
more efforts should be made to focus on utilising the availability of existing data (both
structured and unstructured data) to generate information and analysis on the labour
market. This shall help ILMIA on its BDA initiative by producing smart applications that
enables comprehensive labour market data reporting covering all aspects and fields
of the labour market. Moving forward, this will create pathway for development of
predictive and prescriptive based decision-making.
 JOB MARKET INSIGHTS | ILMIA

References ;
1) 15th International Conference of Labour Statisticians, 1993
2) Bureau of Labour Statistics, US, 2013
3) Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019

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