I had a job, a paycheque, and absolutely nowhere left to grow.
There was a stretch in my career, long before the retrenchment, where I was fully employed, fully busy, and completely stuck. Same title, same scope of work, same ceiling I could see but never quite reach. Nobody around me would've called it a crisis. I had a job. I had a paycheque. On paper, everything was fine. In my head, I was going nowhere, slowly, on a very comfortable treadmill.
If that sounds familiar, you're not imagining it. There's a name for it now, and Malaysia apparently has a lot of it.
The numbers behind the feeling
Malaysia's unemployment rate sits at a healthy 2.9 percent as of Q1 2026, which sounds like great news until you look one layer deeper. Around 1.93 million tertiary-educated workers, roughly 35.2 percent of that entire graduate workforce, are sitting in semi-skilled or low-skilled roles that don't match their qualifications. That's more than a third of degree holders technically employed but not actually using what they trained for, let alone growing into it.
The report puts it plainly: years spent doing largely the same scope of work doesn't automatically translate into professional growth. You can clock a decade at the same company, get your annual increment, attend the same townhall every quarter, and still be exactly where you started, skill-wise. Being employed and being on a career path are not the same thing, and Malaysia's labour market has been quietly letting people confuse the two.
The loyalty trap nobody warns you about
Here's the part that stings a little. Malaysian workers are famously loyal, more loyal than almost anywhere else in the region. One regional survey found 55 percent of Malaysian respondents reported loyalty to their employers, the highest rate in Asia-Pacific, well above Singapore's 37 percent and Hong Kong's 34 percent. A lot of that loyalty was earned honestly, companies that stepped up during hard times build real trust.
But loyalty and stagnation can look identical from the outside, and sometimes from the inside too. Staying because you genuinely believe in where you're headed is one thing. Staying because leaving feels riskier than being quietly unhappy is a completely different thing wearing the same outfit.
I've watched this play out with people I know personally too. I have a friend who upgraded his car the moment he got bumped up to a managerial title, and fair enough, that's a real milestone worth marking. But a title bump and actual growth aren't always the same event. Sometimes the promotion is the company's way of keeping you comfortable enough to not ask the harder question: are you actually building new capability, or just carrying more responsibility with the same skillset you had two years ago?
Comparison makes the stuck feeling worse
Nothing sharpens that feeling faster than watching everyone else's highlight reel. A cousin posts about a new role. An old colleague announces they've relocated for work. Someone from your batch shows up on LinkedIn with a fancy new job title and a suspiciously polished headshot. None of that tells you anything real about whether they're actually thriving, but it's very effective at making your own unchanged job title feel like evidence of failure.
The comparison trap doesn't create the stuck feeling, it just makes it louder.
What actually helped me move again
Across more than 20 years working in marketing, I've shifted lanes more times than I can count on one hand, digital, social, SEO, performance ads, content, web, design. None of those shifts happened because I woke up one day and made a dramatic leap. They happened because I did honest work first, wherever I was, even the stretches that felt stagnant, and then looked for the next small opening rather than waiting for a perfect one to appear.
That's genuinely the advice I'd give a friend who feels employed but stuck. Small, deliberate moves beat waiting around for a big leap that may never come. Pick up one skill adjacent to what you already do. Ask for one project outside your usual scope. Have one honest conversation with your manager about where this role is actually headed, not where you hope it might.
But before any of that, you have to do the boring, unglamorous part properly: put in honest work right where you are, stuck or not. Nobody hands new opportunities to someone who's already checked out of the job in front of them.
The stuck feeling is information, not a verdict
Feeling stuck doesn't mean you've failed. It usually just means the gap between where you are and where you actually want to be has gotten wide enough to notice, which is uncomfortable but also useful. The Malaysians filling that 35 percent statistic aren't lazy or unambitious, most of them are simply employed in systems that never quite pushed them past "capable" into "growing." Recognising that difference is the first real step out of it. The rest is a series of small, deliberate moves, not one big cinematic exit.
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!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
