Career carnival: Inmates being interviewed for jobs by prospective employers.
UNIVERSITI Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) is training prisons department officials to help inmates prepare for employment upon their release.
The course, which trains officials to provide career counselling, is led by the Asian Centre for Research on Drug Abuse (Acreda), which comes under the varsity’s Faculty of Leadership and Management.
The field training for participants of the Certified Abuse Treatment Practitioner (Csatp) course was attended by 30 prison officers from all over the country from October last year to January this year.
Csatp course head and lecturer at the faculty Assoc Prof Dr Amin Al Haadi Shafie said the three-month course equipped the officials with skills to help the inmates prepare themselves mentally and physically for the working world after they had been rehabilitated.
“We are targeting to get a total of 100 participants to join the second cohort, which will start next month and complete in April,” he said, adding that as part of the course, participants were tasked with organising a day-long career carnival at Kajang Prison to motivate the inmates and give them hope of rejoining the workforce.
Some 50 inmates undergoing drug rehabilitation attended the event on Jan 11 where they had the opportunity to be interviewed by prospective employers.
In his opening speech, Prisons Department commissioner-general Datuk Nordin Muhamad expressed gratitude to the employers who attended the career carnival and offered jobs to the inmates.
He also expressed hope that officers involved in this module could implement what they had learnt when they returned to their respective departments.
Separately, the USIM Professor Team, together with students from the Faculty of Leadership and Management and the Faculty of Dentistry, recently concluded a humanitarian mission in Sibangkat Island, Semporna, Sabah.
From Dec 29 last year to Jan 2, the group conducted religious and educational activities, and provided welfare and free dental treatment services to the villagers.
They also donated a generator for the use of the island’s mosque.
The programme was carried out in collaboration with the Semporna Prihatin Organisation, Taqwa Foundation, and USIM Alumni and Career Centre, and its Endowment and Zakat Centre.
Prof Datuk Dr Zulkiple Abdul Ghani, who led the delegation, said, “It is the responsibility of the educators, as well as students and alumni, to join in on community engagement and knowledge transfer.”
He added that USIM alumni who had been successful in various economic and business sectors could also contribute and bring benefits to society by helping in the provision of basic education, especially for communities in rural areas.
