Government job. Marry young. Settle down. Why none of that advice survived contact with reality.
I never went to university. No degree, no diploma, nothing to hang on the wall except a SPM certificate and twenty years of figuring things out the hard way. My parents' generation had a clear rulebook for career success: get a stable job, ideally with the government, marry early, settle down, and let time do the rest. I followed none of it, and somehow I am still here, running my own business, still learning new things at an age where my parents thought they had already peaked.
The thing is, their advice was not wrong. It was right for their time. The problem is nobody updated the manual, and a lot of Malaysians are still trying to build a career using instructions written for a world that does not exist anymore.
"Get A Government Job, It's Stable"
This was the golden rule in my parents' house. A government job meant a pension, security, and something to be proud of at family gatherings. For decades that advice made sense.
It is not holding up the way it used to. Applications to Malaysia's civil service actually dropped by about 200,000, from 1.2 million in 2024 to around one million in 2025. Part of that is due to new minimum qualification requirements, but it also reflects something bigger: fewer young Malaysians see the civil service as the automatic safe bet it once was.
I get why. Stability used to mean staying in one place until retirement. Now it means being able to adapt when the ground shifts, and government jobs were never designed for that kind of flexibility. My own path has been the opposite. I have moved between industries, taught myself new skills every time the market changed, and built something of my own instead of waiting for a pension thirty years down the road.
"Marry Young, Settle Down Early"
The second piece of advice drilled into most of us growing up: don't wait too long to get married. Build your family early, career comes after.
Reality has quietly rewritten this one too. LPPKN, Malaysia's family development board, recently flagged that the average age at marriage in 2024 was 31 for men and 29 for women, a noticeable rise from previous decades. Their own research points to career uncertainty and financial pressure as the driving reasons, noting that young people still want to get married, but financial constraints and the desire for job and income stability push them to delay it.
This is not young Malaysians rejecting the idea of family. It is young Malaysians being more honest than their parents were about what it takes to actually support one. You cannot settle down early into a career that itself hasn't settled.
Why The Old Playbook No Longer Applies
Career paths used to be a straight line: study, get a job, climb the ladder, retire. That line does not exist anymore, and it is not because young Malaysians lack discipline. It is because the ladder itself changed shape.
The gig economy is a good example of this shift. What started as a side hustle for many Malaysians has become a genuine income source, though the boom years of easy entry and flexible hours have given way to an oversupply of gig workers and shrinking pay. At the same time, high-skill digital freelancing and remote work are gaining ground as low-skill delivery and transport work plateaus. In other words, the path forward is not "get a stable job and stay there." It is "keep building skills that stay valuable no matter what the market throws at you."
That is the entire philosophy I built my company on. I did not have a degree to lean on, so I leaned on skills instead. Every time an industry shifted, I picked up something new: digital marketing, SEO, design, web development. None of it followed a straight career ladder. All of it kept me employable.
What I'd Tell My Kids Instead
If my own children ask me one day what career advice I would give them, it will not be "find a stable job" or "settle down early." It will be this: build skills, not titles.
A title can be taken away when a company restructures. A skill stays with you no matter who signs your paycheck, or whether anyone signs it at all. I would rather my children learn how to learn, how to adapt, and how to stand on their own capability than chase a fixed position that might not even exist by the time they are ready for it.
Career paths today are not linear, and that is not a crisis. It is just the new normal. The sooner we stop measuring our children's futures against a rulebook written for a different economy, the sooner we can actually help them prepare for the one they are walking into.
My Take
I get why parents give the advice they do. My own parents wanted stability for me because instability was what they feared most. But holding onto advice that no longer fits reality does not protect the next generation, it just leaves them unprepared for the world they actually have to navigate.
I did not follow the traditional path, and it was not always comfortable. There were years without a fixed salary, moments where relatives quietly worried, and plenty of "why don't you just get a proper job" conversations. But looking back, the skills I built along the way turned out to be worth more than any single job title ever could have been. That is the advice I want to pass on, not because it is trendy, but because I lived it.
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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