Even after 20 years of reinventing myself, that headline still gave me a jolt.
Upskilling isn't a new habit I picked up because of AI. I've been doing it for over 20 years across digital marketing, social media management, SEO, performance advertising, copywriting, content strategy, web development, graphic and UI/UX design, and even photography, because I genuinely enjoy learning new things and teaching them to others while I'm at it.
But I'll be honest, when I saw the headline about 697,000 Malaysian jobs at risk without upskilling, even someone who's spent two decades reinventing himself felt a small jolt. Big numbers do that, regardless of how prepared you think you are.
So let's actually unpack what that number means, because the headline version of it is scarier than the reality, and the reality still requires you to do something about it.
Where the 697,000 figure actually comes from
According to a study by Talent Corporation Malaysia, 697,000 existing jobs face significant disruption from AI, digitalisation, and the shift toward a green economy within the next three to five years, if the people in those roles don't reskill. Human Resources Minister R. Ramanan shared this in parliament, but he also framed AI as a catalyst that could improve job quality and create new high-skilled opportunities, not purely a threat.
The same study identified 120 emerging roles expected to grow. Government figures also show 605,168 active job vacancies against only 188,062 job seekers between January and June 2026, which tells you something important: this isn't primarily a story about jobs disappearing outright. It's a story about jobs changing shape faster than people's skills are changing with them.
That distinction matters enormously for how worried you should actually be. "At risk" doesn't automatically mean "about to vanish." For most roles, it means augmented, reshaped, or restructured around new tools, which is a very different problem to solve than "my entire job is gone tomorrow."
Waiting for someone else to retrain you is the actual risk
I learned this the hard way, sort of, when I went jobless early this year. I didn't wait for a severance package or an employer training programme to hand me my next skillset. I went self-employed almost immediately, and the only reason that transition didn't flatten me was because I'd already spent two decades treating my own skills as something I was personally responsible for maintaining, not something my employer owed me.
That's the part of this story that gets lost in the doom headlines. Nobody is coming to tap you on the shoulder and enrol you in the right course before your role gets reshaped. Companies restructure on their own timeline, usually reactive rather than generous.
If you're waiting for your employer to notice the shift coming and retrain you ahead of it, you're betting your career on someone else's foresight and budget, neither of which you control.
What actually helped me stay ahead of it
The honest truth is that none of my pivots, digital to social to SEO to performance ads to design, happened because I planned some grand five-year reinvention roadmap. Each one started small. I picked up one adjacent skill, applied it somewhere low stakes, got a little better, and let that competence open the next door.
Nobody wakes up fluent in a new discipline overnight, and expecting that of yourself is usually what makes people freeze instead of start.
I still approach it the same way now, decades in. I don't want to be left behind, so learning something new stays part of how I work, not a project I schedule once a year and then forget about.
What I'd actually tell a friend who read that headline and panicked
Pick one small, adjacent skill and start this month. Not a full career overhaul, not a diploma, just one skill that sits next to what you already do and makes you slightly more useful with the tools reshaping your industry. If you're in marketing, that might mean learning how to prompt and edit AI-generated content properly rather than pretending it doesn't exist. If you're in admin or operations, it might mean getting comfortable with the automation tools your company is quietly already piloting.
You don't need to spend money to start either. HRD Corp runs UpskillMalaysia, open to Malaysians across ages, education levels, and industries, alongside programmes for job seekers, senior citizens, and specific communities who need a foothold back into relevant skills. It's a genuinely accessible starting point if cost has been the excuse holding you back.
The number isn't the threat, standing still is
697,000 sounds enormous until you realise it's describing a shift happening over three to five years, not overnight, and it comes paired with 120 new roles actively being created alongside it.
The jobs most at risk aren't necessarily the ones AI touches first. They're the ones attached to people who decided the warning didn't apply to them personally. Pick your one small skill this month. Nobody's going to tap you on the shoulder to remind you, and by the time they do, you'd rather already be three steps ahead of that conversation.
Kamarul Azwan (k.azwan@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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