Employers' Perception On Soft Skills Of Graduates: A Study Of Intel Elite Soft Skill Training International Conference on Teaching & Learning in Higher Education (ICTLHE 2011)

Abstract Acquiring soft skills competencies becomes increasingly important and relevant for those who are providing services. Human Resource practitioners and employers still find the local graduates lacking or mismatching of relevant soft skills competencies required in their job positions. This paper is a survey research. Basically, this research is about employers' perception on soft skills and about the Intel eLite soft skill training to enhance the soft skills of the graduates. The Intel eLite Program, which is initiated by Intel Malaysia, is an university-industry collaboration between Intel and Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Universiti Teknologi Mara. The objectives are to identify the soft skills required by local and multi-national companies and to identify the contributing factors of graduates' unemployment. This research is done to evaluate the soft skills training program for the Intel eLite students, in terms of speaker, content of the training modules and the facility where the session was held. A total of 79 employers responded to the Questionnaire A and 93 Intel eLite students responded to the Questionnaire B. The findings show that all skills identified in the soft skill training of Intel eLite program are important in working place. Lacking of soft skills become the most likely factors to the unemployment issue of our graduates. Intel eLite program has proven to be a good intervention program to overcome the lack of the relevant soft skills from the perception of students. However a few improvements were suggested

Microbial bioconversion of palm oil mill effluent to citric acid with optimum process conditions

Oil palm industry has an important role in contributing to the Malaysian economy. Several million tonnes of crude palm oil is produced annually and approximately, about 10 million tonnes of palm oil mill effluent (POME) (highly polluted organic effluent) is generated every year. Citric acid is a commercially valuable product widely used in many industries. More than 400,000 tonnes of citric acid is produced annually by fermentation of expensive raw materials like glucose and sucrose. Efficient and effective methods of producing citric acid from different cheaper raw materials have been of great interest to many researchers, due to its extensive use. This study is an effort to achieve the goal by introducing a new substrate POME and a potential isolated strain of Asperillus niger. The method used was liquid state bioconversion with optimum process conditions obtained from our previous studies using central composite design (CCD)from Minitab software. The optimized parameters were temperature, agitation rate, inoculum size and pH. Analysis has been done everyday up to seven days of fermentation. Performance of the developed process was evaluated on the basis of maximum citric acid (5.24 g/L), chemical oxygen demand removal (COD), total suspended solid (TSS) and removal of heavy metals (cadmium chromium and copper)

Innovation and the entrepreneurial state in Asia : mechanisms of bond market development

Bond markets have expanded rapidly in emerging East Asian economies in recent years. Asian policymakers have played a pivotal role in this development. This process presents an interesting challenge to the developmental state literature associated with bank-based financial systems. We argue that it is best to understand the role of the state as an entrepreneurial state in the construction of these markets, focusing on institutional innovation in three mechanisms of state-led market infrastructure: national or local credit rating agencies, mortgage corporations and bond pricing agencies. National credit rating agencies rate the creditworthiness of debt in local currency. Mortgage corporations create markets in securitised housing loans. Bond pricing agencies put a value on illiquid debt instruments to enable mark-to-market portfolio management. Together, these three mechanisms constitute the core determinants of the market (demand for creditworthy products, supply of tradeable assets, and the fixing of a price to those assets). In so doing they influence the nature of market operations, producing outcomes very different from the free market ideal type. We also consider cross-country commonalities and variations in this general pattern