The MSC and the NITA
• The MSC is Malaysia’s bold experimental venture into the creation of a world-class multimedia industry. Its objective is to transform Malaysia into a regional and global leader in ICT development and application.
• The NITA is a comprehensive framework for national development in the Information Age. It focuses on the development of people, infostructure (hard and soft infrastructure such as appliances, network, and laws and regulations), and applications towards the creation of a knowledge-based society and economy. Its objective is thus to enable a qualitative transformation of the entire nation, socially and economically.
The success of the MSC and the NITA hinges upon several key factors, most critical of which is people development. To achieve the objectives of the MSC and the NITA, Malaysia needs an adequate supply of skilled, creative and talented individuals capable of breathing life into the multimedia industry and all other industries across economic sectors. Simultaneously, Malaysia needs a thinking and ICT-literate society, one that is able to use computers and other forms of ICT to learn, cultivate human potential, function more effectively and contribute to the development of the nation en masse. The nation requires knowledge workers to fuel future growth and form the foundation of a knowledge-based society and economy.

What are knowledge workers?
At the IT Awareness Campaign on Oct 11, 1997, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad had said: “The future of Malaysia’s economic competitiveness is contingent upon the ability of each Malaysian to harness IT and become knowledge workers.”
The term “knowledge worker” is attributed to Peter F Drucker, management guru and Clarke Professor of Social Science at Claremont Graduate School in California. Drucker generally defines a knowledge worker as a person who employs knowledge in work.
In his article in California Management Review, Winter 1999, Drucker says: “The most valuable assets of a 21st century institution (whether business or non-business) will be its knowledge workers and their productivity… It is on their (knowledge workers’) productivity that the future prosperity and indeed the future survival of the developed economies will increasingly depend.”
A knowledge worker of the Information Age is essentially a person who is both ICT and information-literate (able to access, evaluate and use information from a variety of sources). He or she is also a person who internalises information (thereby turning it into part of a larger body of knowledge) and creates value by applying his or her knowledge. A person who is information-literate tends to be best prepared for life-long learning as he or she would know how information is organised, recognise when information is needed, and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use the needed information effectively, notes the 1989 final report of the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Informational Literacy.

Generating knowledge workers
Malaysia’s Information Age development requires a sustainable, societal-wide application of knowledge for the creation of value that is both economic and social in nature. The adoption of life-long learning by society as a whole is the only means of achieving this. Life-long learning represents a fundamental shift in the focus of education. As such, education systems, formal and informal, would have to be reviewed in terms of relevance and effectiveness in light of new and pressing development needs. All entities involved in people development, be it the family unit, the workplace, or training and educational institutions, will have to do their part in enhancing human potential and building Malaysia’s knowledge worker pool.
It is important to emphasise that the task of generating the country’s knowledge workers goes beyond the “manufacturing” of skilled workers for economic purposes. It encompasses the more complex task of developing people who are knowledge-literate or people who know how to:
• Evaluate information from social, cultural, moral and ethical points of view;
• Discern the relationship between information and truth; and
• Use information while preserving the moral and ethical content therein.
Malaysia’s pool of knowledge workers, as it expands, will serve as the nation’s knowledge capital and dynamo for future economic and societal growth. Only with a critical mass of people who are ICT-literate, information-literate and knowledge-literate will Malaysia be able to leapfrog into a “Post-Industrial/Advance Industrial Society” level of development (as envisioned in the NITA), with its soul intact.