Opinion

Looking at ways to grow the job market

Ray Petersen
 
Ray Petersen
In some respects, the entire concept of the employer and employee dynamic is flawed, isn’t it? For a start, no employer really wants an inexperienced employee. It’s usually much better to have an employee who knows the job already, who is aware of the parameters of the workplace environment, employee interactions, relationships, division of responsibilities, and who has measurable skills, knowledge, understanding and experience. They, employers, don’t even want to take on someone they don’t know, because they don’t know their reliability, their punctuality, their personality, their ability to work effectively with others, their cultural sensitivity, their integrity, their ability to work to deadlines and function effectively under pressure, their gender consideration and responsiveness, their real skills, the depth of their knowledge, or their understanding of the job of work that lies in wait. As a potential job-seeker therefore, there are a lot of people ahead of you in the queue when you leave university, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, cap and gown returned, but primed and ready for the big, wide world of jobs, work and salary, and straight into a catch-22 situation. If you are outstandingly smart, and I’m talking here of a GPA of 3.7 and above, presented a stunning graduate project that demonstrated a genuine awareness of the impact your topic has on Oman or the world, innovative or well-researched conclusions, immaculately presented in faultless English, you will almost certainly have been ‘head-hunted’ by a major employer, and have a job already. No matter where you are in the world, the employment landscape now becomes a very tricky place for those not in the ‘first cut.’ Forgetting that you have the vacancies to check, applications to make, interviews to do, and in most cases, disappointment to deal with, this is not an easy time of life, and will test your character and resilience to the ‘nth degree. The governments of many countries have subsidised ‘new employee’ programmes, which encourage an employer to take new graduates by subsidising the salaries for a period (usually 6 or 12 months) while the employee is gaining workplace skills and experience. This encourages ‘new blood’, and therefore new ideas. Usually, only 50 per cent of the subsidy is paid to the employer during that initial period, to preclude an employer from manipulating the system. Another workplace incentive is the ‘bonding’ scenario, where employers pay for, or subsidise a student’s higher education, and in return the student is ‘bonded’ to, and works for the employer for the same amount of years as their education was sponsored. This requires significant employer investment, and is usually only available to identified higher achievers. Then, of course, there are ‘apprenticeships’, usually a feature of vocational employment, but can be easily adapted to any workplace environment or employment sector. In apprenticeships the employee will have a component of their work week (usually between 10 per cent and 25 per cent) devoted to skills training, and will undertake regular assessment and verification to, and at, nationally defined and accepted levels, by qualified examiners. This achieves the objective of training the employee while they are gaining workplace and industry experience. The training period will be for the full term of the apprenticeship, which will be for a full 4- or 5-year term, and is rarely transferable. There are a number of other options available to employers, and governmental, national level schemes to stimulate employers, but somewhere along the line, as much as the skills and knowledge are important to the workplace, reliability, responsibility and a work ethic are even more indispensable. If you have those, then so will you be. Think about it. Make yourself indispensable. Ray Petersen petersen_ray@hotmail.com