The Effectiveness of Vocational Teacher Training Program in Enhancing Communication Skills Among Prospective Vocational Teachers

Abstract: Malaysia moves forward to increase the number of high skilled laborers in 2025. This expectation, however, reflects the readiness of education institutions in offering good students preparation before getting into the real workplace environment. Teacher is one of the crucial models in an education system that may impart with the dynamic changes in student skills acquisition and thus the development of generic skills among future teachers are seems necessary, especially communication skills itself. As in Malaysia, the efforts in the development of teachers' skills in communication have been fully established and implemented in the curriculum of the Vocational Teacher’s Training Program. This study was done to distinguish the perceptions of students in mastering the Interpersonal Communication Skills among Technical and Vocational Education and Training (PLTV) students after attending the Vocational Teacher Training Program. The sample consists of 200 respondents with a total of 158 prospective teachers of undergraduate students from the Faculty of Technical and Vocational Education, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) as well as 42 people of prospective teachers of undergraduates from the Faculty of Technical and Vocational, UPSI. The methodology that has been used is descriptive and inferential statistics through a questionnaire with a five-point scale and Cronbach Alpha coefficient of 0.954. The analysis showed no significant difference between students who participated in the program and not participate program. This is, however, the overall mean value among students attending the program is slightly higher than students not attending the program indicating that this program is statistically able to improvise students’ skills in the future. Therefore, the empowerment in the implementation of the Vocational Teacher’s Training Program seems crucial so that it could continuously strengthen the communication skills among prospective teachers. Keywords: interpersonal communication skills, program bina insan guru vokasional (bigv), prospective vocational teacher program, teacher training program