On 18 March 2020, Malaysians learnt a new term - MCO, or Movement Control Order. There was reported panic buying of food and toilet paper in some major cities across the country. Confusion and fake news were the order of the day before some sense of order was restored.

Fast forward to December, Malaysians are trying their best to make sense of all the various acroynms - MCO, RMCO, EMCO and TEMCO plus the changing conditions of each. However, one thing has remained true - Malaysians are spending even more time online than ever before.

Workers and students finally experienced what is was like to 'Work/Study from Home'. Online learning has been touted as the way forward for the last two decades but it took a pandemic to make it a reality. For employees, their fantasy of working from home finally happened. In most cases, fantasy and reality are like night and day.

Through it all, the one thing that proved to be a major differentiator was this; whoever was ready for digitalisation had a far smoother journey than those who were totally unprepared. Technology managed to connect employers with employees and their clients. Zoom meetings became the norm. Prior to this, most people had hardly any exposure to online meetings as almost everything needed to be conducted face-to-face.

Many employers suddenly 'saw the light' so to speak and in recent months, job recruiters have seen an increase of jobs that require candidates to have digital knowledge. Having an employee that's IT savvy saves the company a lot of time and cost as minimal training is required. In fact, employees with the right digital knowledge will find much better job opportunities.

According to MDEC (Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation), there will be an additional 185,000 jobs in the digital industry for this year. These jobs are spread out amongst emerging areas such as FinTech, Creative, eCommerce, Iot, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

The figures above are just estimates but we can predict that the actual numbers hover even higher especially due to the pandemic.

For employers, especially SMEs, the Malaysian Government is also advocating a push into digitalisation with many grants, aid and programs made available. Here are just some examples: