New graduates in Sabah have been advised against being choosy about employment especially when the country is facing an economic slowdown.

Chief Minister Musa Aman said the state government was always concerned about the attitude of unemployed graduates who chose professions that fulfilled their personal satisfaction.

“Just accept whatever job that is available and from there, learn to do your work properly.

“We must grab whatever opportunity that is available to improve ourselves first before we can succeed in our career,” he said when officially opening the state-level 1Malaysia Open Interview Training Scheme (SL1M) at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) in Kota Kinabalu today.

Musa said the government would always play its role in ensuring that there were ample job opportunities created in the state to be filled up by locals.

The Director-general of the Economic Planning Unit in the Prime Minister’s Department, Dr Rahamat Bivi Yusoff, hoped that private companies would always have an open mind and give an opportunity to the graduates to excel in their jobs.

He said the difficulty faced by most graduates in getting a job was due to the fact that they did not have specific skills required by the industry despite having excellent qualifications.

“The SL1M programme is a government intervention programme created in an effort to address the issue of unemployment among Malaysian graduates.

“Under this program, the graduates are trained and given an opportunity to experience for themselves the actual working atmosphere in the private sector,” he said.

The state-level SL1M Programme is being held for two days beginning today at the Dewan Kuliah Pusat Kedua UMS and involved 40 private companies offering more than 3,000 job opportunities.

- Bernama