“The development of talent management in Malaysian public sector: a comprehensive review”

The aim of this current study was to analyze recent development of talent management among public service managers in Malaysia. The study brings understanding on talent management and broader human capital issues within Malaysia context by analysing the comprehensive literature. Government of Malaysia is emphasizing on development of talent in the public sector, as it is the most significant resource for the public service. The study found that the government has invested in various programs and initiatives to develop and produce key talented human capital within the public sector. However, despite the initiatives taken by the government, Malaysia is still short of talented people and struggling to develop talent, and talented skilful people are leaving. The study also indicated that year after year increasing number of graduates are being produced at the public universities, but the education system is not producing the right skilful individuals for the particular position or task, resulting in talent mismatch. Another key issue is the incapability to retain talented people that led to poor innovation and creativity within the country. Is key issue is part of the factors discussed in the 10th and 11th Malaysia Plan, and is a concern, as it plays a role in preventing the progress of Malaysia in achieving a developed nation by 2020. As one of the key aspirations of Malaysia is to enrich public service in Malaysia as a citizen centre that is having tal- ented human capital. The study revealed that there is a need for in-depth quantitative and qualitative further research to discover new insights on talent management and retain talent among the public sector managers in Malaysia.


INTRODUCTION
Talent management is seen to have created the interest of many academics and practitioners both within the public service and private sectors globally.Talent war is not something new, as it has been an on-going issue for the past 10 years, which has drawn interest of many researchers (Thunnissen et al., 2013), however, in the recent two years, it has become more complicated and though there has been many research done in the perspective of talent management, yet there is still no consensus of proper definition of talent management, theoretical backgrounds and scope (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2015).Some researchers have also criticized that talent management has limited by focusing on selective organizations, for instance, US-based organisations, and multinational (MNC's) and private organizations (Collings et al., 2011;Powell et al., 2013) and lack of emphasis is seen on the public sector in addition to shortage of empirical studies (Skuza et al., 2013).Talent management is important for country such as Malaysia that is moving towards being a developed country (Vaiman et al., 2012), whereby the government pays serious attention to increasing human capital through talent development (Tymon et al., 2010;Vaiman et al., 2012).

BUSINESS PERSPECTIVES
Main pressure and emphasis are seen for much more focused aspects of talent management, as constant changes are seen in the environment globally in the recent years.This has resulted in shortage of skilful people, changing in the demographic aspects such as aging, gender diversification, educational aspects that increases the competition among talent that has huge impact on organizations today (Thunnissen et al., 2013;ManpowerGroup, 2015).In addition to that, transformations are seen from the perspective of businesses, for instance, moving forward from product-based to knowledge-based economies requires creative and innovation conceptual mind thinkers of employees to carry out such complex issues that look upon quality, skills, characteristics of talents that are in search (Schuler et al., 2011;Vaiman, Scullion, & Collings, 2012).
As it is Malaysia's aspiration to be a developed nation by 2020, bearing this in mind, the government has entered into its final phase with the 11 th Malaysia Plan.The 11 th Malaysia Plan works towards helping Malaysia to strive the challenges and opportunities ahead positively towards being innovative to step up Malaysia's development.One of the key driving forces is the human capital development.In the 21 st century, where volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are major concerns, the skilled human resources are known to be the most valuable asset.
It has been noted that great emphasis has been given to the public sector of Malaysia on the aspects of talent management and yet there is an on-going debate on creating and cultivating talents within the nation, especially in the public sector (EPU, 2016).The public sector is responsible for designing and monitoring policies practices (Taylor & Wright, 2004), including being responsible for the governmental duties and regulations (Sandhu et al., 2011).Decisions that are carried out in the public sector have an impact on entire people and credibility of government itself.Therefore, it is vital to develop key potential talented public servants with the relevant key competencies to ensure efficient public service delivery.Studies and researchers have shown that Malaysia is struggling to retain talent (Nasir et al, 2012;EPU, 2016), this current study is carried out to assist the policy makers in terms of talent development, particularly among managers in public sector.The discussion of the study is expected to bring the understanding on talent development among managers in Malaysian public sector context to cultivate and transform skilful resources across the board to meet with the 2020 nation's mission.As such, the aim of this study is to identify key factors and prevailing issues on talent management in Malaysia and propose suggestions to minimize those issues on talent management among the Malaysian public service managers.The study contributes to the body of talent management literature with the main focus on the perspective of the Malaysian public sector servants from a developing country's viewpoint.Despite the competing definitions on talent management, talent management and its perspective have transformed from being the 'old reality' (people need organization) to the 'new reality' (organisation needs people) (Chambers et al., 1998) (see Table 2).In the current century, many organizations, including public and private sectors locally and globally, are facing scare of skilful, talented people, though there are jobs, but organizations are unable to fill in that positions with the right person.It is vital to understand that in the present and in the future, there are bright prospects for talented individual to get job either in business, industry, government, non-governmental agencies or multinational companies.

The old reality
The new reality

Key issues of talent management in the public sector of Malaysia
Talent management is the key success of any organizations to sustain and remain competitive, similarly, at the public sector, it is vital to ensure that the talent is managed appropriately, as it resembles and portraits the country as a whole (Collings & Mellahi, 2009).According to the CIPD survey (2012), only 6% of organizations consider that they have talent management systems to be effective.Thunnissen et al. (2013) claim that talent management if often than otherwise is overlooked, although organizations have pool of talent, but it is not going to success if the talent is unable to retain and develop.In order for the public sector in Malaysia to strengthen, the human capital is vital to identify, analyze and evaluate the existing issues of talent within the sector.
The main key issues under the talent management in the public sector of Malaysia are as follows: 1) Vision 2020 -to be able to have advancement in technology, well educated and trained public servants across the government bodies with the strength of networking towards achieving a developed nation and to be able to create sustainable development of skilful resources (OECD, 2013); 2) lack of potential employees with the right expertise and employability skills, including transferability skills (PwC, 2013); 3) talent mismatched -between skills demand and supply in job market (OECD, 2013); 4) weak productivity growth due to shortage of creativity and innovation in producing work and rely more on unprofessional workers (National Economic Advisory Council, 2010); 5) inability to attract talent has led to low innovation (NEAC, 2010).
Malaysia has taken various steps and measures to address the above issues and to be in line with the aim to drive towards the Vision 2020 with the national transformational framework to get the nation towards highly skilled workforce and into the developed economy (OECD, 2013).The measures that are taken will be discussed at length under the 10 th and 11 th Malaysian Plan, especially for the public sector in Malaysia, to develop the civil servants in the country.However, despite the measures taken, Malaysia is still lacking in managing their talents and to develop skilful resources (PwC, 2016).No.

2013
No. One of the initiatives taken by the government of Malaysia is embarked on a national transformation framework that has a main focus to become a high income country by 2020.The national transformation framework comprises of three pillars:
In Malaysia, the 10 th Malaysia Plan between 2011 and 2015 focused on critical aspects of the government administration reform and strengthening human capital in public sector.Specifically, the 10 th Malaysia Plan agenda are: • restructuring the existing government organisations structure and hierarchy; • priorities to building national identity; • creating performance measurement and assessment units; • raising and maintaining talented and skilled workers in government services.
In addition to the 10 th Malaysia Plan, 11 th Malaysia Plan (2016-2020) was also introduced that stress-es the focus to strengthening talent management for public service of the future (EPU, 2016).The emphasis is made that talent within the public sector is crucial and is significant resource for the growing public service.It is vital to strengthen the talent management, capabilities and leadership for improved quality and services.
To achieve the 11 th Malaysia Plan (2016-2020) on strengthening talent management in the public sector, the following has been brought forward (EPU, 2016).
1. Recruit employees on a contractual basis to find talented employees.This is to invite specific and specialized talented skilful individual for available positions on a contractual basis within the public sector.Successful applicants would be given flexible pay and structured KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).This would eventually secure the talented employees and help the organizations to plan for development of human capital (EPU, 2016).

Flexibility of work schedules.
The government will be open towards flexible working arrangement and accommodate to individual needs where possible to provide with a worklife-balance with much more flexibility within the public sector.Examples: flexible working hours, part-time opportunities to retain skilful individuals and minimize on new recruitment -this would encourage more women to consider or single parents -women that have to care for their children.

Empowering ministries to customize talent management.
The government will bring in place a bottom-up approach to minimize the centralized approach.The agencies will plan and develop talent management programs based on the requirements and priorities.
In addition to that, initiatives were taken to standardize performance evaluation based on individual roles and functions across each agency, introduce a standardized fair appraisal system in the public sector that enables rewards, job promotion, training and career path being offered equally to public servants (EPU, 2016).The aim of talent management within the public service sector is to provide pools of public servants with outstanding characteristics to serve public, stakeholder and sustain competitive advantage in the long run (EPU, 2016).Key importance to produce and retain talented skilful individuals in the public sector is that these individuals' frames set the image of the country.Though many initiatives were taken by the government to plan, organize and develop the talent in the public sector, there is still a long way to be successful in retaining the talent and skilful resources within the public sector.

Public servants in Malaysia
Malaysia is known to have the highest number of civil servants in the country and it is vital to recognize that to plan and manage 1.4 million public servants that deliver different type of services across three layers of government is highly complex that requires huge level of commitment, involvement, participation, effort and contribution of the public sector Human Resource (HR) managers (Chacko, 2015).There is a lot of work and involvement required for effective and efficient smooth transformation for the successful revolutionizing of the public service.Public Services Commission, as they oversee the rules and regulation on managing public servants starting from appointment until retirement phase.It is vital for the government of Malaysia to develop and retain the existing public servants and to provide with the required training needs and skill development to ensure that each and every one of the public servants has the abilities and capabilities to deliver the required services to the public at large.At the same time, by developing and retain the existing public servants the government would be moving towards their Vision in achieving a developed nation.

Education
Education is an important aspect of building human capital and is the key to support the nation's objectives.It is worth to acknowledge that within the local public universities in Malaysia in 2015, there has been a total of 540,638 enrolment of students.Table 5 shows the detailed number of enrolment of students at each of the public universities in Malaysia.It is also noticed that high number of women is seen to be entering 63% in comparison to men 37%; enrolment in the public universities of female students is 60% and male are 40%; and the number of graduates for women is 63% in comparison to men 37% (see Tables 6 and 7).This shows that more women are seen to be more interested in further education in the public universities in comparison to men.Also 95% of the students in the public universities comprises of local students and 5% are international students (see Table 8) (MOE, 2016).Most of the students are enrolled into the undergraduate programs (78%), postgraduate programs (18%) and 4% on other programs (Table 9).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The current paper indicates that overall as a nation, Malaysia is still facing difficulties in developing talent and those talented skilful individuals in Malaysia are gradually leaving.Simultaneously, the education system is producing graduates each year, but these graduates are unable to fulfil the skills demanded by the organization.Malaysia's human capital situation is at the critical phrase not only with skill shortage, but also criticisms on lack of creativity and English proficiency, constantly has been ranked high among the top obstacles faced (NEAC, 2010).Comparing Malaysia on unskilled and semi-skilled labors with some of the advanced economies, for instance, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, indicates that Malaysia is still in higher rank of the group.
Government has taken tremendous measures with the 10 th and 11 th Malaysia Plan to compete and to identify that talented workers as valuable assets in the public sector for the growing economy to meet the status of a developed nation, however, this result is not satisfying, as there is still shortage of the dynamic talent.The government has introduced different program within the public sector to develop and attract skilled talent, but still unsuccessful.The government still requires aggressive improvement in developing the human capital by having higher value added activities (NEAC, 2010).
This research suggests that Malaysia's public sector has to reach out by committing, participating and to be involved in developing and enhancing the skills.Public servants must strive to make improvement and changes to develop the talent within the sector.The current study shows that the human capital in Malaysia is improving at a very slow pace.Malaysia is losing the skilled talent that is needed to drive the country into a developed country by 2020 and for further growth.In order for Malaysia to move closer towards the Vision 2020 and be a developed nation, investments with respective development plans have to be concise, focused, standardized across all government agencies and systematically avoid sector silos.Another suggestion is 'attitude of the leader' is vital within the public sector agencies, as it contributes to drive the sector towards making the differences.The leader's attitude is important in the development of talent and its activities towards emphasizing on continuous development, transferability skills and gradually the ability to strengthen the to retain and create the talent pool within the public sector.As the public sector plays a major role of the image of the country, it is suggested that proficiency of English language to be improved and the education system to develop the transferable skills, and skills requirements based to meet with the demand of the industry.These are needed, as Malaysia is at the core of a vibrant region and strategic location that draws interest of international investments that looks for innovative skills and offer value added and embrace new technology.In order to meet the international aspects, investment talent in Malaysia, especially in the public sector, has to be strengthened.
The paper fills in the gap in the talent management studies by contributing from a different perspective to exploring talent management aspects, especially for the public sector in Malaysia.Though previous studies have been carried out, the author believes that further in-depth quantitative and qualitative studies would provide with new insights on talent management and retaining talent of public servants in Malaysia.Therefore, perhaps future field study can examine differences of talent in the public and private sector.

Table 1 .
Definition of talent (Chambers et al., 1998)re capable to retain talented managers(Chambers et al., 1998).Assumptions were made on successful organizations to remain talented managers of the organization that has good mitiga-tion plans and process of the human resources management in place compared with the less effective organization.The study proved that the assumptions made were incorrect.It revealed that the

Table 5 .
Number of public universities enrolment Source: Planning, Research and Policy Coordination Division, MOE (2016).

Table 6 .
Entrants, enrolment and graduates at public university by fields of study and gender Source: Planning, Research and Policy Coordination Division, MOE (2016).

Table 7 .
Percentage and ratio of students at public higher education institutes by gender Source: Planning, Research and Policy Coordination Division, MOE (2016).

Table 8 .
Enrolment and percentage of international students at public higher education institutes Source: Planning, Research and Policy Coordination Division, MOE (2016).

Table 9 .
Enrolment and percentage of graduates at public higher education institutes Source: Planning, Research and Policy Coordination Division, MOE (2016).