Despite the fact that Malaysia's unemployment rate tend to be volatile around 3.0-3.2 percent, there seems to be a clear upward trend since the end of 2014.

However, according to MIDF Research in a note, it should be noted that the 3.3 percent in December 2015 was not the seasonally adjusted rate.

Malaysia's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate currently stands at 3.1 percent, significantly lower than November's unemployment rate at 3.3 percent.

Despite that, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate had also been in an upward trend, where both the unemployment rate and seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was at 2.7 percent in October 2014, before slowly crawling up to the current level.

As a side note, MIDF Research said Malaysia's unemployment rate reached 4.1 percent during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

According to the Department of Statistics, the number of unemployed people climbed to 478,100 in December from 453,300 in the prior month.

A year ago, the jobless figure totalled 432,100. The labour force participation rate came in at 67.8 percent in December, up from 67.7 percent in November.