ABSTRACT
Korea and Malaysia are two parallel rising trading powers. The need for more technicians in their growing industries is accepted although, particularly in Korea, the local concept of a technician is not necessarily the one understood in Western Europe. In Korea technician status is acquired through on-the-job training after leaving technical high school or through attendance at an institution of higher education. Production technicians are usually high school graduates and engineering technicians generally graduates of junior technical colleges. There is a constant push to upgrade institutions, and six of the junior technical colleges have become ‘open universities’.
In Malaysia, where there was formerly little need for technician education, action is well under way to produce 20,000 technicians a year by the 1990s. This will be achieved by expansion of vocational skills linked to the creation of polytechnics.
The particular dynamics of the two countries and their different cultural backgrounds have led them to tackle the need for technicians in rapidly developing industry in quite different ways. The common ground is that each country has considerable national energy, determined goals and self-confidence. The different ways in which they are achieving their aims are appropriate to their own perceptions of their goals.
