Written by Amirah Sohaimi
The long hours of juggling between assignment deadlines and dissertation updates to your supervisor are actually coming to the end. So, the big questions came; what to do next? Corporate career? Marriage? PhD? Or just laying around doing nothing? I prefer the latter, but I have to be realistic.
The hard cold fact that we need to take into account is the possibility to land a job nowadays is pretty thin. You have to compete with thousands of undergraduates. According to Higher Education Minister, Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh, a total of 54, 103 university graduates were unemployed within six months after they completed their study in 2016. Predictably, the courses involving the highest unemployment rate were business, applied science, human resource management, accounting, literature and social science.
But, that does not mean you cannot get a job. There are plenty of things you can do while waiting for job opportunities and one of them is mastering another language.
Master another Language
Have you ever come across job openings that require someone who knows more than one language? With how the world is connected nowadays, we have to know more than our mother tongue and English. Mastering more than two languages is common these days. Most people know at least two if not three. When you think about it, knowing another language can land you a job anywhere in the world, and how exciting is that?
Besides that, mastering another language is exciting and mesmerizing. If you able to master another language, you can definitely capture the attention of others. Imagine being a Malay girl who is not only can speak fluently Malay and English, but also Mandarin, German, and Arabic. Isn’t it interesting? People will want to know more about you, why you choose that language and what do you want to with it. Aside from you can converse with people from another country, it is also helpful during interviews because people will find your language skills way more fascinating that the internship you had in university.
Once, an Arabian lady told me to learn Arabic so that I can understand the Quran better. Learning a language isn’t easy. We all know that. No matter what language you try to learn, even taking the time to learn it is worthwhile. You don’t have to be good at learning but you do have to realize that the world is changing and we need to be able to communicate with each other.
So go explore any language courses and get speaking!