COMMENT | Nurul Izzah Anwar has the uncanny ability to zoom in on an issue. Barely two weeks after being made the chairperson of the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) , she has come out with impressive statements. And they drip with numbers and facts, which make her all the more believable.

"Five ministries, two Malaysian national plans and more than RM10 billion spent over a span of three years, from 2015 to 2017 - and where is technical and vocational education and training (TVET) today?

“Still plagued by stories of thousands of stranded, unqualified youths, awaiting placement and promises of a better future," she affirmed in a statement released on July 7 to the Bernama news agency.

Among others, Nurul proposed that all TVET credentials must be on par with at least an MA degree, without which their credentials would be discriminated in the market place. She is right.

But upping a TVET credential to MA standards need time. Yet, as the late John Maynard Keynes, the British economist is known to have said: "In the long run, we all dead." Policies, in other words, cannot be too slow to take effect since the lives and welfare that matter are immediate.

Invariably, she explained that Malaysia should be looking at the TVET apprenticeship system of Germany, where companies and industrial training can be matched very early on in the students’ career....