Students’ Tendencies in Choosing Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET): Analysis of the Influential Factors using Analytic Hierarchy Process

In the era of Industry Revolution (IR) 4.0, business and industry are being transformed by a new wave of digital technology. In order to boost the economy’s prosperity in Malaysia, skilled workforce or well-trained manpower is vital in accomplishing the goal.However, it requires mainstreaming Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET)in education system by providingcomprehensive training, effective research consultancy, holistic courses, collaboration, student placement and program attachment opportunity. Coherent from this issue, the government can produce more skill workers that can handle the rapid changing world of work. In Malaysia, there are more than 1000 TVET institutions, where 506 are considered as public institutions. However, itstill receives less attention by the students after secondary education. The identified potential factors are TVET instructors, current policy in Malaysia, social perception, employers’ perception, parents, facility, education cost and student themselves. Therefore, this study aims to rank these factors according to the levels of importance using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. AHP is a method used to rank criteria by assigning the weight for each criterion. In this study, primary data is collected using questionnaires from 32 TVET instructors of Institut Kemahiran Belia Negara (IKBN) in northern region of Malaysia. The result of AHP shows that the variable of parents is the most influential factor with the weight of 18.81%, followed by the variable of facilities (18.56%). Conversely, the least influential factor is the variable of social perception with the weight of 7.21%. Hence, the government should implement appropriate strategies to attract more secondary school students to enroll in TVET programs. Due to the growth of skilled workers, our country is expected to transform the landscape of the manufacturing industry over the next decade. Hence, developingthe country’s productivity and curbing youth unemployment.