Brendon Beliku is a corporate immigration and employment compliance professional based in Kota Kinabalu. He writes independently on Sabah’s economic governance, labour policy, regulatory affairs and Momogun empowerment.
KOTA KINABALU: Roughly one hundred Private Employment Agencies are registered to operate in Sabah, a figure practitioners in the field cite as a working estimate given the absence of a published official count.
Every one of them handles work that sits at the intersection of employment law, immigration compliance and state administrative practice, preparing the applications that let specialists move into industries Sabah cannot yet staff on its own.
None of the practitioners doing this work hold a professional qualification for it, because no such qualification exists. A Private Employment Agency licence under the Private Employment Agencies Act is a business registration.
It authorises a company to operate. It does not certify a person, set a standard of competence, or give the individuals doing this work anywhere to stand as a recognised profession.
That absence is not a small technicality. It is the reason academic and practitioner analysis of Sabah’s skilled workforce approval pipeline currently has to be submitted through a chartered institute built for logistics rather than one built for the field it actually describes.
The discipline exists in practice. It does not yet exist as a profession with institutional standing of its own.
–What a Chartered Home Would Actually Look Like–
Other fields facing comparable regulatory complexity solved this problem decades ago.
The United Kingdom has had the Immigration Law Practitioners Association since 1984, a professional body founded specifically to raise standards, train practitioners and give immigration and asylum law representation a collective institutional voice.
Malaysia’s own logistics sector has CILT, its accountants have MIA, its lawyers have the Bar. Corporate immigration and mobility practice in Malaysia has none of this. The field is instead populated by commercial consultancies, competent firms doing genuinely skilled work, but operating as businesses rather than as members of a chartered profession with shared standards, continuing education requirements, or a code of ethics specific to the work.
A chartered home for this discipline would mean a defined body of knowledge, a credentialing pathway comparable to what chartered institutes already offer in adjacent fields such as logistics, accountancy and law, and a professional register that distinguishes a trained compliance specialist from a general business services provider offering immigration paperwork as one line among many.
It would also mean a collective voice in exactly the policy conversations this field currently sits outside of, discussions about local hiring verification, single window processing, and the codification of state level clearance criteria, all of which affect practitioners directly but which the field currently has no chartered body to speak into on the profession’s behalf.
–Why This Is a Momogun Empowerment Question–
Momogun professionals are, in all likelihood, already working inside this field, in the agencies, the corporate compliance teams and the consultancies handling this exact category of work across Sabah.
What none of them currently have, and what no practitioner in this field currently has regardless of background, is an institution that recognises what they do as a profession worth chartering.
Empowerment discourse in Sabah tends to focus on access into existing professions, more Momogun lawyers, more Momogun engineers, more Momogun accountants.
It rarely asks whether a field a Momogun professional is already practising in has been given the institutional dignity of profession status at all.
A Momogun compliance specialist working inside an unrecognised field carries all the technical burden of professional work without any of the standing, credentialing or collective bargaining position a chartered body would provide.
This is where the empowerment argument sharpens rather than softens. Building a chartered body for corporate immigration and mobility practice in Malaysia is not a Momogun specific project, and it should not be framed as one exclusively.
But a Momogun professional already doing this work has exactly as much to gain from that recognition as anyone else in the field, arguably more, given how directly this discipline intersects with the state’s own local hiring and
Momogun empowerment policy objectives. Recognising the profession does not just legitimise the individuals practising it.
It gives the state a credentialed, accountable body of practitioners to consult when it designs the very local hiring verification and single window reforms this field has been quietly asking for.
–The Case for Building It Now–
Sabah does not need to invent this model from scratch. Chartered pathways, professional status, continuing professional development, a recognised examination route, already exist as templates across several adjacent fields within the same institutional landscape, logistics among them alongside accountancy and law.
The question is whether corporate immigration and mobility practice follows that same general path deliberately, or continues operating as an unrecognised discipline indefinitely, doing the work of a profession without ever being allowed to call itself one.
For the Momogun professionals already inside this field, and for every practitioner working alongside them, that recognition is overdue.
[Disclaimer]: The views, opinions and analyses expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies or positions of the Jesselton Times, its editors, management or affiliated entities. This article is published for analytical and public discussion purposes and should not be construed as institutional commentary or endorsement.
