Teaching competency among academic staff of Malaysian private universities: an exploratory study

Academic staff plays an important role in delivering knowledge and skills to students in an organizational academic environment. Private universities in Malaysia are not exempted from this axiom. The academic staff is considered as a leader, instructor, facilitator and above all Subject Matter Expert (SME). Furthermore, they have the challenging task to deliver the subject matter, create a positive classroom environment, exhibit exemplary personality, and showing high level of praise and encouragement to the students. In this modern day, there is a strong demand for competent staff. Competency is a complex process whereby it involves the interaction of staff, students and environments. 400 academic staff was involved in this study. Most of the researchers agreed that competencies deliberated are focused on three strong factors such as knowledge, ability and skills. This study analyzes the need for competency based’ attributes to be ingrained within academic staff in a Private University in Malaysia. The study herein emphasizes on three competency dimensions namely; personal dimension, academic dimension and work place dimension. The finding shows that there is a high level of relationships between the demographic variables, e.g. job title, tenure and ethnicity and the three competency dimensions. A development of a competency model for academic staff is proposed to ensure they provide quality students that in turn will transform into world-class global workers.