Corporate irresponsibility in Malaysia: The Training Fellows Project

Corporate irresponsibility in Malaysia: The Training Fellows Project                                                           

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some years.

Towards the end of 2011 I realized that the Training Fellows Project English language project involving  by  a private British company in Malaysia using funds from the Deputy  Priminster  was basically a rort.  

Several Training Fellows had left the project to seek other work.

I was very dissatisfied myself and had come to the conclusion (after about twelve months)  that the 36 month  project was irredeemable. I felt my position was increasingly untenable

The preposterous situation was that my corporate employer was only happy for me to continue to  receive my good salary and enjoy my benefits  as long as I remained in post and did absolutely nothing!

Catch 22!

After twelve months the situation had become unsustainable.  All fifteen of the training fellows in the five University teacher training colleges were expected to produce a monthly plan of our proposed activities upon which the HOD at each university would sign off. This sounds quite reasonable–but the Catch 22 was that neither the HOD, nor the Lecturers wanted us to do any work! So the monthly plan was a work of total fiction–created with the collusion of the Malaysian HOD and her Lecturers in order to satisfy the Ministry of Education–our paymasters. Upon receipt of our reports the Mod then paid our  company who then paid us.

So..no plan? ..no salary.

When we complained to our company that the plans were fictitious we were studiously ignored. The British company was happy to pay us for doing absolutely nothing. After a few months of this some training Fellows started to seek positions elsewhere.

The Malaysian HOD and the lecturers were justifiably upset that they had not been consulted during the set-up phase of this project. This was the responsibility of the MOE and the company. In fact , when many of us  physically arrived at the University ‘in trios’ in January to start the project on the first day of the year, the HOD did not even know who we were! They were not expecting us and justifiably were astonished and  upset when we told them!  Imagine the reaction of  an HOD at a school in Australia if three new ‘experienced foreigners’ turned up on day one  expecting to have  have their classes  timetabled!

The fact that many of the Training Fellows were not ‘experienced’ Teacher trainers made a bad situation worse. Many of us had been recruited at the last minute (by myself!) without knowing what the program was even about. In fact, as the ‘leader’ of the program in the first 3 months myself I did not know what the  program was about  myself -and this was because the company didn’t know either!

Not knowing the program was one of the reasons I resigned as Team leader.

In fact, the whole project turned out to be  political and funded by the Deputy Priminister who disagreed with the language policy of his own Ministry of Education!  

The Lecturers also soon realised that we, the Training Fellows, had not been consulted or informed about the purpose of the project either.

Much to their credit and that of the HOD  in my opinion, and in the characteristically  polite and diplomatic way of Malaysians not wanting to offend, they  ‘decided’ that the best solution was for us to stay–but on the condition that we do absolutely nothing at all which interfered with their work! This was a complex and contradictory issue  because it eventually emerged that the aim of  the project was to ‘update and modernise’  the methodological  and pedagogical  skills of the Lecturers themselves.! This fact only became clear to the lecturers a  few months after the project had started. You can imagine what the Lecturers thought of that!

Again, nothing wrong with that objective, to upgrade pedagogy-except that many of the Malaysian Lecturers were more experienced than the Training Fellows themselves!

There had been absolutely no preparation or training for any of the stakeholders in this project by either the Ministry of Education or the company!

Who was to blame ultimately  is another matter, and this Is probably not the place to go into it .  Suffice it to say that the highly politicised nature of language instruction in Malaysia and the lethargic pace of operation of the Ministry of Education had a lot to do with it.

A complete waste of Taxpayers money? Yes, of course..but what I want to focus on is the completely unethical and unacceptable behavior of the British Company

All of the Training Fellows were put in an absolutely intolerable situation where our professionalism  was completely compromised. We were being paid and obliged to do nothing! It was like one of those experiments where humans were paid to inflict pain on victims

I had resigned as leader after 3 months inventing a bogus health complaint. But I desperately wanted the project to recover and continue for the simple reason that I needed the money. However, after twelve months I too had had enough of doing nothing and I was the eighth of the fifteen Training Fellows to resign and return to Australia.

During my fifteen months in Malaysia I listened to many an exhortation  from colleagues  to sit and do nothing and take the money. But In the end I could not sustain it.