The Importance of Practical Training for Diploma Students: A Study in UiTM Kedah, Malaysia

Abstract

Nowadays the world is rapidly changes especially in working life, society and information technology. Process of learning will be more effective when the students are being exposed to the real working condition by practically applying their knowledge and also the skills that they had learned. The scope of this research is just focus on the importance of practical training for diploma students in UiTM Kedah. The sample size is 25% from the population which is 180 respondents that been choosing from the final year students which are the part 5 and part 6 of diploma students in all programs. There are several main objectives of this research and tries to identify whether gaining experience, enhancing skill and proficiency, producing highly demand in job market and balance between theory and application has significant with students taken practical training. As a result of findings, this study found that all the variables has significant with the importance of the practical training. They realizes that the practical training is the best medium to gain experience and think it is importance to see how work in real situation as well as a possible medium to enhance skills and proficiency. In order to make students realize the important of practical training, The awareness of the respondents towards the organizations demand for experienced, educates, skilful and quality graduates has made them believe the importance of the practical training. Lastly, the respondents also think that the practical training is very importance whereby their theory education should be strengthening by the application of the practical training and it gives big opportunity for the future career. Service quality has emerged as a key strategic issue in management. The service quality assessment tool SERVQUAL was introduced by Parasuraman (1988) that cover tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, and assurance and empathy dimensions of service quality. The objective of this study is to investigate which service quality dimensions that mostly influenced the service quality in public library in Sungai Petani.. The study was conducted among library users and the information was gathered via questionnaires which consisted of structured questions. In this study, simple random sampling was used where only 132 respondents were selected. The discussion methods are using the Descriptive Statistic and Multiple Regressions used to analyze the result of this study. The findings indicated that all three hypotheses which are tangible dimension, reliability dimension and responsiveness dimension was accepted by the researchers. Based on the finding, the reliability dimension is a significant with service quality in public library Sungai Petani which is mostly influenced user’s in using the services. However the researchers recommend that the management of public library Sungai Petani needs to focus on several services that needs further improvement such as the online public access catalogue (OPAC) and welcoming atmosphere is important part of providing excellent services towards modern library service. In future research, the library’s management should take an effort to create the pleasant surroundings to encourage the widest possible segment of the population to use the library and to regard it as an essential part of community life and more ‘user freindly’ with the customers. Key words: Service; Quality; Service Quality; SERVQUAL; Library; Public Library; Users