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.
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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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