Hardy Loh Rahim

Enhancing Graduate Employability Through Social Entrepreneurship

Employability is a major issue for Malaysians. It is even more so for the graduates. Currently the nation has unemployment rate of 3.0 % amounting to 425,000 unemployed people. Numerous efforts are being done to solve the issue, and one of them was by promoting entrepreneurship development with the intention of intensifying the creation of entrepreneurs among graduates by creating job opportunities on their own as well as for others. In relation to the entrepreneurship agenda by the government to cope with the unemployment issue, this study will investigate the emerging concept of entrepreneurship called social entrepreneurship. The main objective of this research paper is to study on how social entrepreneurship could improve the graduate’s employability. A program conducted to promote social entrepreneurship was observed to address a number of unemployment causes that were highlighted in previous studies. Twenty-five students from all over Malaysia participated in the program and were researched using phenomenology method. The findings show that by involving students with social entrepreneurship programs, they are unconsciously being embedded with skills needed for employment such as confidence, English proficiency, creativity and innovation, selflessness, leadership, teamwork, time management, knowledge acquisition, networking, and communication skills.

Empowering Disabled Youth With Entrepreneurial Values

There are 445,006 disabled people registered in Malaysia and around 7919 were able to get job placements. Due to the critical problem, this paper studies the impact of the Special Youth Social Entrepreneurship Program (SYSEP) on empowering the disabled youth with entrepreneurial values in hoping that they are better equipped for employment or even start their own business. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of this programme towards the entrepreneurial competencies of the disabled students and to investigate whether there is any difference in entrepreneurial competencies across the demographic, specialisation and types of disabilities. A survey method using a standardised Likert-scale questionnaire was used among 87 disabled youths who participated in the programme. Pre- and posttests were conducted. The findings show that the programme was able to increase 10 out of 13 identified entrepreneurial competencies and there is no statistical difference in entrepreneurial competencies among the gender, specialisation and types of disability.

The Relationship of Entrepreneurship Courses, Entrepreneurship Activities, Academic Grades, and Business Creation Among Graduates

Malaysia is a nation that emphasizes on entrepreneurship and business creation. In line with the nation’s direction, academic institutions have been inculcating entrepreneurship in both curriculum and extracurricular activities in order to create more graduate entrepreneurs. This paper, therefore, seeks to study the influence of entrepreneurship courses and entrepreneurship activities on business creation among graduates of Malaysia higher learning institutions. The research also investigated the moderating effect of academic grades between entrepreneurship courses and business creation. A sample of 244 business owners who graduated from higher learning institutions in Malaysia was surveyed using standardized questionnaire of 5-point Likert scale. The findings indicated that both entrepreneurship courses and entrepreneurship activities influenced business creation among graduates with the latter as the most influencing factor. The academic grade has negative moderating effect on business creation, suggesting that the lower the academic grades of a graduate, the higher the probability of business creation.