Something to labor over
published 12 May 2008
What would you tell your child who seeks your advice on the course he should take up in college? Would you tell him to pursue the field he is most passionate about, believing the chances of success are greater if he loves what he does? Or would you recommend a list of specific courses, or name one in particular, in areas where there is an abundance of jobs and better-than-most pay scales? All to have some measure of security that he would not end up underemployed, unemployed, a bum?
Now the government says the root cause of the country's unemployment problems is the mismatch between job seekers' qualifications and the actual vacancies in the labor market.
According to acting Labor Secretary Marianito Roque, most of the college graduates looking for jobs are commerce degree holders who usually look for employment in the finance, banking and marketing sectors.
It figures. A business-related degree is perceived as generalist and therefore safe. My grandmother used to say: “Mag aral kang mabuti, para kumita nang malaki habang maghapon ka nakaupo sa malamig na opisina, papirma-pirma ka lang (Study hard so you’ll earn big money just by sitting in your comfortable office, affixing your signature…)”
But it turns out that most job vacancies nowadays are in the technical sector. Opportunities abound for nurses, call center agents, sales clerks, customer service assistants, carpenters, occupational therapists, and sales associate professionals. Fresh graduates specializing in other areas must then contend with jobs that hardly make use of what they spent four years learning -- or keep searching.
That’s just the domestic market. As we know all too well, the easy way out is to sniff around for opportunities abroad. But while overseas employment provides instant relief, for the families of the workers who now have more disposable funds and for the national economy padded up with foreign currency reserves, it remains a sorry reminder of the inability of the government to provide sustainable means of income for its citizens.
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I was at the mall on Labor Day and noticed the unusually thick crowd downstairs at the food court. There was a job fair going on.
That one was one of the many fairs sponsored by a local television-radio station. In other places on the same day, the labor department held similar fairs, the biggest of which was at the World Trade Center where 30,000 jobs were offered by numerous companies. These are good moves, but one wishes these things took place more frequently and regularly, instead of on May 1 only. Of course everybody is thinking “labor and employment” on this day.
Roque also says that the labor department is addressing the mismatch through the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority which has been given instructions to offer more trainings for job seekers. Exactly what these trainings are, and how they purport to correct the employment incongruity, is not altogether clear.
What is clear is that students need to be given a picture of the outside world even before they make their choices on the colleges they would attend and the courses they would pursue. There should be better-designed career orientation programs in both public and private high schools. Career counselors, aided perhaps by government representatives, should provide briefings on the various industries and sectors of the economy, their growth prospects and the opportunities for advancement that they offer.
These campaigns should not be your typical one half-day seminar. On the contrary, children must be given the time and the parameters to really think about what how they want the rest of their lives to pan out. “Bahala na” is not an option. Even at that age, they must be aware that they must take control.
It’s a free country, of course, and ultimately it’s the children who decide which they want to pursue. But there are only a few who know exactly what they want, only a handful who know for sure they want to be doctors, lawyers, journalists, musicians, geologists, meteorologists, etc. Most teenagers just go along with the flow. So why not direct the flow? It doesn’t hurt to give them as much input as we can for them to make good choices.
It is good for the government to have targets. It is perfectly all right to say, in 15 years, we should have attained GDP per capita of this much, unemployment rate should be kept to a minimum of x percent of the labor force, and so on. But it would be better if, armed with a fairly realistic and accurate projection of the industries or sectors that would bring this country to long-overdue development, we could anticipate where the demand for jobs would come from. What skills, and at which levels, would be needed. What areas would need specialization.
That may be of some reassurance to parents who want nothing more than see their children succeed; success, of course, being a healthy combination of position, income, the level of challenge, plus a few intangibles that make a person look forward to the next day and not wish he were doing something else.
