Hi Gilbert,

I am dropping you this email, to thank you, and to show my support for your Transitioning website. It was really by chance that I stumbled upon your website.

The global recession is adversely affecting  our daily lives and we faced intense competition for jobs from our foreigner talents at our doorsteps.  Though I do not have any issue of unemployment as of now, I would like to share my humble story about the problems I faced when I was in a career transition recently.

I remembered  enrolling myself as a regular with the Navy, straight after my graduation from polytechnic in 2005, to support my family financially. While servicing my term as  a Navy regular, I held big dreams of etching a career outside. Though my pay is relatively stable,  I found myself with no proper prospect working  as a regular. In addition, my outspoken personality has often got me either praises from my officers or thumbs-down from some of my old-fashioned superiors.  However,   things took a fortunate  twist when  I signed up for a Twitter account in 2009.

As Twitter was a new media platform at that time, only a few bunch of self-professed “social media elites” subscribed to this service. Meeting them was such a refreshing yet disappointing experience for me. Whenever there was a gathering, I would have to cope with many surprised replies about my career path. While some would praise me with admiration, many would ticked me off as someone “with no far sight”. It was discouraging to say the least.

After contemplating my career path for a long while, decided to plan  my exit from the army service and pave a new chapter of life for myself. As a hobby, I have a keen interest in writing and pen my thoughts during my free time. And with that in mind, I chanced upon a recruitment for delegates for “APEC Voices of The Future” 2009. This youth exchange programme is held annually in conjunction with the APEC summit. At that time, they were looking for  40 Singapore youth delegates to participate in the event.

What appealed to me was that successful applicants would not only get the chance to represent their country,  moreover they also have lots of opportunities  to get up-close with various delegates. In order to “test-water” for myself to see if I could really make a mark in this field, I decided to try my luck and went ahead to  apply  to be a delegate. And to my surprise, my application was successful! Indeed, during the programme, we were given the rare opportunity to meet many sharpest brains behind every governmental agencies , as well as NGOs and multi-national corporations. I was also given the chance to write reports and get interviews with some of these people during the programme. And with that, I’ve decided to plan my exit from regular service in end-2010  and  decided on pursuing a degree in mass communications in a distance-learning programme.

At the moment when I decided to submit my resignation, I knew I had a lot of adjustments to make and face a lot of hurdles. Firstly, my remuneration will surely suffer. Knowing that my working experience would be (very) irrelevant, I was prepared to accept any sort of jobs with a starting pay of $1800 a month, compared to the cushy $2700 that I was getting every month then. Next, I need  to cut my expenses and change my spending habits drastically.

Soon, news about my resignation were made known to many people. While I have friends who supported my decision, there were others who  looked down on me, saying that my “working” experience in the Navy would be of no use in the outside world. Looking for a job also came as a stumbling block to me, where many resumes were sent out without a reply. Fortunately, one of my many my job applications came back with a positive answer, whereby  a local bank decided to employ me as a Customer Service Officer. While I knew the job was going to be very tough, I accepted the job readily grasping  every opportunity that was presented to me. I was hungry then I guess.

I started with the  new job early this year –  full of passion. However, dealing with customers isn’t easy at all. While I appreciate that some customers are nice, I had met alot of horrendous ones. There are  times that some customers  hurled abusive words at me and there was a period I could not cope  well with the stress. But I continued to cling on tightly to my job.

A rare opportunity came when I was studying  for my degree course.  I met a classmate who was working for a local media company. At that time, the marketing department of a particular magazine was looking for a temp staff. Jumping on the media bandwagon, I decided to give in a shot. Thanks to the recommendation of my classmate, I managed to get this temp job, where I could really hone my skills in the media industry. I would not be able to predict what will happen when my employment contract ends on 31st March ’12, but been able to get out of  my previous employment with the uniformed services and the bank was counted as  a blessing to me.

Currently, I am still in the midst of pursuing my degree, and  my dream is  to become a journalist. Though it may be a far-fetched dream, I just want to share with everyone that with dreams, we can fly. To those who are unemployed, please tell them that they’re not alone facing the troubles of the current harsh corporate world.

And Gilbert, those blog posts on your website were a form of positive motivation during those trying times when I was in transition between jobs.

Let me know about what I can do my part for Transitioning, and I will try to help within my means.

Keep in touch, and take care.

Regards,

Jimmy

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