Just Been Laid Off in Malaysia? Here's Your Next Step

The scale of what is happening

The stability of the Malaysian job market is facing one of its biggest tests. According to PERKESO's Employment Insurance System (EIS), 2026 began with about 10,700 layoffs in January, then 7,500 in February and 5,900 in March. In the first 16 days of April alone, another 4,708 were reported. The monthly pace was slowing, but the cumulative impact is massive, and it signalled heavy downward momentum going into the second quarter.

To put roughly 28,800 people in perspective, look at the KL skyline. A landmark like Menara TM in Bangsar is built to house roughly 5,000 to 6,000 workers. The number of Malaysians who lost their jobs since January could fill five of those towers. Imagine every floor of five skyscrapers going dark at once: every desk empty, every office locked. That is an entire corporate district's worth of people suddenly without a paycheque.

Why it is happening: a perfect storm

Your retrenchment is not a mystery. Two forces hit at once.

First, energy. Since late February, disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical energy chokepoint, which handles roughly 20% of global LNG and around a quarter of seaborne oil, pushed Brent crude above US$108 a barrel, with peaks around US$126, up from around US$72 before. When a factory in Shah Alam sees its energy bill soar, it does not just raise prices. It looks at headcount. That is where many of these layoffs came from: manufacturing, logistics and retail.

Second, AI and automation. As the New Straits Times warned, Malaysia is no longer immune to AI-led job cuts. In the past, companies waited for things to recover. In 2026, with powerful AI tools everywhere, many are using the crisis as the moment to pull the trigger on automation. It is a double hit: the energy crisis made human labour expensive, and AI made digital labour cheap. It becomes pure maths. And AI is moving into cognitive work: writing reports, analysing data, legal research, the very things many people went to university for. We map which roles are most exposed in the jobs AI will kill first in Malaysia.

The part that does not make the news

Let me talk about the day after. You hit your KPIs, worked the late nights, were a good team player. The psychological toll of being laid off is real. It can trigger a spiral of self-questioning: was I not good enough? Was my degree the wrong one? Was it all a waste of time? Your confidence takes a hit and part of your identity goes with the job.

Your nine-to-five gets replaced by a soul-crushing cycle of job portals, refreshing your inbox, waiting for replies and being ghosted by recruiters. If you are there right now, please hear this: a layoff driven by energy prices and automation is not a verdict on your worth. It is a verdict on how exposed your role was. Our guide to what to do after tech layoffs has practical first steps.

Do not rush back into the same position

Here is the hard truth. If your industry was hit by the energy crisis or squeezed by inflation, applying for the exact same role at a different company is not a strategy. It puts you back in the same vulnerable position, at the mercy of the next oil spike, the next crisis, the next round of "operational optimisation".

So the answer is not just finding another job. It is changing the game you were playing. Technology is not a monster that eats jobs. It has been reshaping work for hundreds of years, and humans have adapted every time. It is a tool that needs a new kind of worker to build it, manage it and direct it.

Your industry plus technology

While thousands apply for roles that are being automated, there is a real shortage of people who understand how technology and automation actually work. That is why we are seeing the rise of the AI-native software engineer.

The most valuable skill now is not just knowing your industry, or what you learned at university. It is knowing how to work where technology and your industry meet. Finance, marketing, manufacturing, logistics: your existing knowledge cannot be a standalone relic of a few years ago. Align it with where companies are heading. When you combine what you know about your industry with the ability to build and automate, you stop being a cost to cut and become an asset that helps the company scale.

This is also where people who were laid off have an underrated advantage. You know exactly which processes in your old industry are slow, manual and expensive, because you lived them. That is the context needed to build useful tools. Read why you can't get a job in Malaysia and what works for how career switchers can use that edge.

Where to start without wasting money

You probably do not need another degree; going back to university would cost years and money you may not have right now. And learning purely from random tutorials rarely works, because nobody tells you what to learn in what order. What you need is a roadmap.

From replaceable to the person who builds

This is probably not the first article about upskilling you have read since the letter arrived. But if you take one thing away, let it be this: this is the moment to upskill into a better role, not back into the same one. You do not want to be the first person replaced at the next sign of a crisis. You want a role where you keep adding value whichever way the world moves, and increasingly that means working with technology: AI, automation or software engineering.

I speak with CTOs and CEOs across the industry, and with people trying to break into tech every day. The people who come through layoffs strongest are the ones who treat it as a pivot point. If you want the full structured path from zero to building real full-stack applications with AI, mentor-reviewed, look at our AI-Native Software Development Programme. And if you are a mid-career switcher wondering whether it is too late, read career change at 30 in Malaysia or career switch at 40.