An Empirical Analysis of Malaysian Pre-university Students' ICT Competency Gender Differrences

Network and Mobile technologies industries have been the fastest growing industries in the World including Malaysia. The Malaysian government has given due emphasis on network and mobile technologies with the conceptualization of the MSC and other ICT initiatives in order to steer our country towards a high-income and knowledge-based society as well as achieving the status of a developed nation as stated in the Vision 2020. Nevertheless, the lack of competent ICT personnel has been the main obstacle that needs to be addressed immediately in order to alleviate the problem of providing the necessary human capital required by the network and mobile industries. The most effective way to uplift the number of ICT savvy personnel would be through ICT education in order to upgrade their ICT competencies. The issues of gender differences in terms of ICT competencies have been widely studied especially in the Western countries. This paper attempts to provide a different perspective in that it fills in the gap of lack of information pertaining to the Malaysian pre university students’ ICT competencies. The findings from this study may lead to implications to the teaching and learning of ICT subjects as well as their evaluation and assessment in Malaysia. The utmost end result would be the emergence of more ICT savvy personnel who may contribute to the development of the network and mobile technologies sector in Malaysia.