Industry revolution 4.0: the readiness of graduates of higher education institutions for fulfilling job demands

Abstract

Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) is the mass implementation of cyber physical systems in the industry, which leads to an intelligent, connected and decentralised production that influences the value chain related to the regulation of organisation. Therefore, local graduates should have the ability to advance themselves and need to be flexible in order to adapt the shifting IR 4.0 trend in job competency, new knowledge and expertise so as to meet the new requirement pertaining to job demands in IR 4.0. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the issues related to the work readiness of local graduates before they work in a IR 4.0 environment. In this regard, several previous studies related to the issue of the graduate work readiness issue were analysed and reviewed. The reason for focusing on this issue is to make sure that IR 4.0 is humanled and human-centred. Based on the findings, Malaysian graduates were found to lack knowledge about working in a IR 4.0 environment. Other emerging issues are the inability of the graduates to apply the skills acquired during their studies especially the soft skills, their low proficiency in English, low self-confidence and attitude problem. Another issue discussed by many researchers was the graduates’ skill gap and skill mismatch to the IR 4.0 job demands. Due to aforementioned issues, the previous studies attempted to solve the problem through the development of Learning Factory (LF) framework. The Pre-Professional Identity (PPI) theory was also set forth as one of the attributes pertaining to the graduate work readiness for IR 4.0.

Keywords

• industry 4.0
• ir.40
• work readiness
• graduate employability
• job demands