MP SPEAKS | Once, long before the 14th general election, during a media interview on youth and employment, a journalist asked me to comment about youths having little or no job experience and not having the right behaviour required by potential employers.

This is a rather prevalent view. Many people think that while youths today are smart, they just do not have what it takes when it comes to employment.

This question lingered in my mind long before I came into the youth and sports ministry.

Recently, a friend of mine from the World Economic Forum, himself a CEO of a major multinational corporation, said something similar to me.

My reply to him was when older people like 'us' talk about job experience, we are really referring to the familiarity of how things work within the system which we grew up in and perhaps whose rules we even wrote.

But think about it. This sort of experience may not be relevant in the new world our youth are creating for themselves today.

The VCR repairman’s experience will not make sense in the Netflix world.

Today, the buzzword is 'disruption'; but this is not only about disruption in the economy where new innovation enables companies such as Uber and AirBnB to circumvent traditional capital to provide services direct to consumers.

Think about social initiatives such as Teach For Malaysia, Buku Jalanan or Dapur Jalanan. All these essentially operate using the same principle: they bypass the traditional middle layer to directly serve their target groups.

Such enterprises, whether business or social or political, operate in a radically different manner from their counterparts of the last generation. As such, it does not make sense to expect the same skill set, knowledge or even behaviour from the youths of this generation in order for them to succeed in the new world they have created.

Thus, the generational battle will be detrimental to our society if the older generation, who obviously had an earlier head start and is better resourced, refuses to recognise these new dynamics and continue to censure young people for having no experience and the wrong behaviour.

Perhaps it is good for our generation to recall what it was like to be the first generation to own and operate a personal computer at our home and workplace.

Good values, soft skills

I am sure many of us will remember how the generation before us thought that we were “strange” and how we “wasted” so much time playing on the computer.

In other words, we did not have the right behaviour. Thank god for that, because this wrong behaviour eventually birthed the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

What I want to say is this – the generational battle is not a one-sided story. It is not just about youth lacking experience or having the wrong behaviour. In order for the society to fully tap into the powerful energy of our youth, we have to change the way we think about them.

Yes, we need a good quality education system, we need to nurture good values and we need to train young people with soft skills.

But the reverse is also true: we also need employers and leaders of the last generation to change the way they do things in order to better capture the young talents of this generation.

This is why we see tech companies such as Google or Facebook adopting new ways of operation in order to attract young people who may not want to work in the environment of the old system.

Today, there is a bevvy of programmes aimed at training fresh graduates on how to 'behave' in order to secure a job; from writing resumes, to dress codes to conduct during interviews etc.

Perhaps new programmes should also be created to train employers how to 'behave' in order to win millennial talents.

Otherwise, either we force our youth to abandon their creativity to adopt our old ways of thinking or we risk being put out of business by the new enterprises they will set up.

In other words, if we do not change, we will either kill off the Gateses and the Zuckerbergs of the next generation, or we’ll end up working for them instead.

STEVEN SIM CHEE KEONG is the MP for Bukit Mertajam and deputy minister of youth and sports.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.