Does Malaysia Practice National Human Resource Development?

Abstract

National Human Resource Development (NHRD) has been a critical national policy agenda in the development of recently developed countries. Malaysia as a progressing country seems to have adopted key national level human resource development (HRD) strategies in its development policies. Studying whether Malaysia has NHRD, understanding the nature of its NHRD, and defining Malaysia’s NHRD can provide new insights to the current knowledge base. This paper, thus investigated into understanding how Malaysia has adopted NHRD in its national policy planning context and then identified the meaning of Malaysia’s NHRD. A qualitative research design, using grounded theory method was employed in this investigation. It was found that Malaysia’s NHRD evolved gradually to Human Capital Development (HCD), currently in use, from population management mainly to cater to economic purposes and to resolve its prolonged key challenge of sustaining national unity.