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My letter was published in the online edition of Voices in Today 10 June.
I refer to the article “There’s a course for everyone: WDA” (Today 6 June).
Firstly, I find it strange that many people flock to the government asking for retraining and work as if it is the government’s job to look for work for them when this should be the personal responsibility of individuals. We may have already develop a dependence on the government thus weakening our own self reliance and survival instincts. This, in the long term, will be bad for the population.
The Community Development Councils (CDC) and Workforce Development Agency (WDA) have done their best in trying to match retrenched workers with the right training course and reemployment. However, Singaporeans should not solely depend on such government agencies for employment purposes.
CDCs and WDA are not recruitment agencies and they have limitations here due to their manpower constraints and screening expertise. For the professionals, managers, engineers and techinicians (PMET), it takes more than a simple job match to satisfy both the requirement of the employer and the job seeker. There are other considerations like career path, salary adjustment, potential for grooming to higher appoitnment among others. It is not as simple as matching for a security guard or a cleaner who have a simpler job scope.
In fact, I find that our CDCs and WDA should relinquish their job matching duties to professional recruiters especially for PMETs. PMETs, being more complex and detailed in their job search, should not be treated as with the other rank and file jobseekers.
The PMET jobseeker needs a more detailed comprehensive approach often requiring the expert skills of a headhunter or a human resource expert.CDC career consultants currently, I feel, lack such human resource skills to handle the expectations of PMETs.
Perhaps due to the huge volume of PMET cases faced by CDCs, many jobseekers also faced the unpleasant task of mishandling or worse still non response. This should not be the case.
Moving forward, it may be good for CDCs/WDA to focus on their core duties of helping the rank and file and as for the PMETs more can be done to liberialise the kind of courses that they can take up on their own.
For an engineer who has lost his job, a diploma in hospitality may not appeal to him much even if it is offered free of charge but a post graduate course relevant to his discipline may be more appropriate.
A small budget can be made available to the jobseeker who wants to go on a course of his choice that is not found on the current WDA retraining list. Many I am sure will appreciate a tweaking of this retraining scheme which so far has being receiving quite alot of criticism.
Gilbert Goh
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Gilbert is true that PMETS should not go to CDC, WDA.
But GLCs should lead the industries by employing older PMETS!
That had more impact than jammed up CDC!