Creating internships that actually work

WITH July’s student internship cycle starting, are universities promising “future-ready” graduates while trapping them in “past-bound” training patterns?

This question becomes pressing as Budget 2025 allocated RM7.5bil for bridging industry skills gaps, and the Human Resources Ministry’s new 1:3 Internship Policy (requiring three local student internships per foreign hire) comes into operation from 2026.

Timing is critical. The Depart-ment of Statistics reports Malay-sia’s graduate job mismatch worsened in 2022, with 1.68 million graduates in skill-related underemployment – working jobs that don’t match their qualifications, creating costly cycles of job-hopping and skills misalignment.

Critics pinpoint the structural disconnect. SMEs (small and medium enterprises) comprise 97.4% of Malaysian businesses yet lack training infrastructure, while interns are inadvertently channelled to large corporations offering perfunctory roles rather than career-building experiences.

Students from around the country spend money on relocating to Kuala Lumpur for internship work, disrupting affordable campus life, only to return and job-hunt again after graduation. Universities face derailed campus logistics as cohorts disappear mid-semester, while student loans don’t cover the hidden costs of internships, including relocation and transport.

Companies waste resources investing in workers who leave after three months. The Malay-sian International Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Malaysian Employers Federation warn that the 1:3 policy may deter multinational investment, while the New Industrial Master Plan and MyDigital initiative languish without skilled talent – waiting for future engineers and artificial intelligence programmers who waste semesters on irrelevant internships.

This reveals a fundamental paradox: we champion university- industry partnerships to create market-responsive curricula, yet internships – supposedly the bridge between classroom and career – remain disconnected from this shared mission.

This disconnect exposes a deeper structural flaw. Universities mandate internships as graduation requirements, asking academics – whose expertise centres on intellectual development – to assess workplace readiness.

Rather than forcing this hybrid approach, a more elegant solution would be to redirect Malaysia’s policy focus towards in-study practical labs and structured post-graduation training.

By decoupling classroom learning from workplace training, we enable students to complete degrees without costly and stressful mid-study disruptions, while delivering job-capable graduates for employers to invest in long-term, not temporary interns needing basic skills remediation.

Specifically, Malaysia could implement six proven alternatives:

> Micro-learning intensives: Mirror Johns Hopkins’ “Global Immersion” week-long sector rotations eliminating relocation costs while broadening sector exposure.

> Digital-first collaborations: Adapt Estonia’s remote approach where students collaborate on real projects with international teams, developing digital competencies while still having campus support.

> School partnerships: Unleash student talent across disciplines, contributing to home-based schools, inspired by Mexico’s Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro (Youths Building the Future) programme channelling youth energy into community development.

> Campus innovation labs: Apply Finnish phenomenon- based learning, bringing corporate challenges to student groups. Students tackle real problems in controlled environments without leaving campus.

> Flexi-skills boot camps: Mirror Singapore’s SkillsFuture intensity, offering targeted two- to three-week competency programmes with partners across specific industries.

> Post-graduation training programmes: Adapt Japan’s Sogo-shoku (career-track position) model where companies rotate trainee graduates across departments, after which selected candidates receive permanent job offers.

Starting January 2026, we can channel the 1:3 policy’s resources towards targeted skills development rather than disruptions, stop forcing students to shoulder relocation costs for yesterday’s patterns, and start building tomorrow’s workforce with the budgeted RM7.5bil in skills funding.

Malaysia can make university internships that actually work, by making students work after graduation, when they matter most.

DR SYED ALWEE ALSAGOFF

Fellow

National Council of Professors