As organisations across Malaysia and ASEAN compete fiercely to attract and retain top talent, traditional compensation practices are under scrutiny. Salary history, a long-standing anchor in compensation decisions, is increasingly viewed as outdated and counterproductive.

Walk into any boardroom from KL Sentral to Penang’s tech parks and you’ll hear talk about AI upgrades, wage hikes, or the next marketing blitz. Strangely, the one item that still hides in plain sight is the simplest: how fired-up your people feel on Monday morning. That’s employee engagement—and it’s either lifting your numbers or quietly draining them.

Retaining top talent today is harder than ever. In a landscape where talent is mobile and expectations are high, business leaders face a critical question: How do we grow and retain our best people without bloating the budget?

It’s not a hiring issue. It’s not always a training gap. More often than not, it’s a disconnect between what we say people should be good at, and what we expect them to actually do in their roles. Yet, for many businesses, competency remains an abstract concept. It’s referenced in leadership pipelines, talent reviews, and performance appraisals but rarely applied with clarity or consistency.

In February 2025, the Malaysian government announced the new Minimum Wage Order, which took effect immediately, increasing the national minimum wage from RM1,500 to RM1,700.

As the global economy becomes increasingly digital, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in transforming workforce development has become a hot topic. We see aggressive growth in the AI space with new AI models being released constantly, from GPT, to Copilot, to Gemini, to Grok, to Llama.

As we step deeper into the post-pandemic world, organisations globally are grappling with the future of work. Remote and hybrid work models, once considered temporary solutions, have become permanent fixtures in the employment landscape.