Dr. Mohammad Naim Yaakub is the 10th Director General of the Colombo Plan Staff College, an international organization with 40 years of existence. He is the first Malaysian to hold that position. He possesses an engineering qualification, is a seasoned administrator, an experienced researcher and project manager and a Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) advocate and practitioner. He was a three-time winner of the outstanding service award while serving the government of Malaysia prior to joining CPSC. At CPSC, he was commended by the CPSC Governing Board for turning CPSC into a very efficient organization through the conduct of the most number of programs with the least cost while maintaining a high degree of participants' satisfaction and performance.
His role as Director General involves the management of CPSC including planning, implementing and monitoring of its programs and projects. The Director General is also responsible for establishing networks with strategic partners, both regionally and internationally.
Dr. Naim, as a TVET expert has shared his expertise and knowledge in numerous international, regional and national fora in and outside the Asia-Pacific region. In the past 2 1/2 years alone, Dr. Naim has supervised and addressed programs in countries like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Canada, China, Fiji, Germany, India, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
He had written many papers for journals, proceedings and publications on wide-ranging topics on industrial training, web-based learning, monitoring and evaluation, sustainable development and green economy, research studies on Polytechnics, computer-assisted instruction in technical education and numerous concerns on technical education. He pioneered the publication of the Technical Education Journal in Malaysia and the STEPS (Scholarly Technical Education Publication Series) journal in CPSC. He supervises the Web Based Teaching and Learning System in CPSC that is accessible to TVET practitioners in its member countries.
Dr. Naim graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering in 1983, from the University of Wales, Swansea, UK. He took his Master’s degree in Civil Engineering at the University Technology Malaysia in 1990 and earned his Doctoral degree in Technical and Vocational Education from the Virginia Tech, USA in 1998.
