The Comparison Life and Career Skills among Premier, Conventional and Metro Polytechnics Students in Malaysia

The 21st Century education requires a holistic transformation in terms of infrastructure, knowledge, and teaching strategies that encourage a more complex thinking process. Life and career skills are essential to both learning and work in the 21st century. The purpose of this study is to determine the difference between life skills and career skills of flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-directed skills, social skills and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, responsibility, and leadership, between Polytechnic students in Malaysia. This study used a quantitative research approach. The respondents consisted of 527 students at the Polytechnic diploma in Malaysia, which is determined using stratified random sampling. Data was collected using a questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by t-test and ANOVA using SPSS version 21. The results of this study show that there is a significant difference between the flexibility and adaptability skills possessed by the students in different types of polytechnics in Malaysia. However, this study found that there is no significant difference between the initiative and self-direction skills, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability skills, responsibility, and leadership skills possessed by the students in different types of polytechnics in Malaysia. Therefore, researchers suggest that future researchers explore other critical elements of Work Readiness with 21st-century skills for polytechnic students in Malaysia.