Lifetime skills is one's surest passport
Over the last decade, I’ve actively assisted some of our own people secure jobs in the private sector. These are people who finished or didn’t finish high school looking into the crack of dawn of optimism of gainful employment.
I never quizzed what brought about this quirk of fate, but I kept my determination strong to find them a job where they can begin learning a skill (on the job) or get a taste of the uneven terrain of life after campus. Some whom I’ve placed dedicate their time and effort learning their roles in a business organization at entry level pay. They’d complain that their salaries are “too low” and hardly find enough in their biweekly or bimonthly earnings to feed their families.
I’d patiently explain that what they have as unskilled workers is commensurated with entry level salaries or wages. They look at me straight in the eye searching for better answers. I don’t have it and never will. The equation doesn’t involve me. The whole issue revolves around their level of skills to which there’s nothing up that alley to support their whining for more in terms of hourly wage.
When the whining continues, I’d snap right back telling the new recruits “stop complaining and start learning”. Some have bounced around in search of better salaries and have since settled down. It’s a natural phenomenon at the entry level. Others have decided to call it quits altogether turning to mom and dad for all their needs. It’s the communal system being used as a backstop. I get nothing but tons of frustration at what the future holds for these spoiled brats.
Unless they voluntarily step into the education circle where they can learn lifetime skills, most of these indigenous young people are doomed given that stiff competition where employers search for highly skilled workers, will become a difficult hurdle for most of them.
Deepening crisis vs. public funds
Facts and figures on the steady decline of local revenues tell the dire reality of the financial straits of the local government. Interesting that the gulf between reality and that ultra-sense of indifference among drone or redundant employees continue to widen beyond our wildest imaginings.
When I say redundant employees, I’m talking about the bunch whose low-skills isn’t needed in either sector because they can’t read, muchless, write simple sentences. This is the bunch that lord over lower rung employees who are better skilled than them. And so they order them around to write justifications or simple office memo. If you ask them to do it themselves, they’d be sweating before computers to which they have yet to learn its use. A short while later, they’re out and about wasting time at no less than six hours daily paid for royally by local taxpayers.
Even in the midst of shrinking government revenues, we still hear divisions and departments working on restructuring salary scales to, believe or not, raise the salaries of useless government employees. Apparently, the message about austerity hasn’t sunken into their cranium and must have taken this term to mean the exact opposite! Disgusting, isn’t it? It’s a tale that they haven’t been able to understand what have been reported in the newspapers about abrupt revenue decline. Is it a problem of reading comprehension?
It’s a serious drawback that sends most reasonable private sector managers out the doors with dropped jaws quizzing if what they’ve heard is real or imagined. Well, that day of doom is fast approaching. I’m not an alarmist by nature, but the constant display of indifference among government employees who perpetuate the local attitude of mañana is really worrisome. A`Saina lai, fan-gai konsiderasion nu i famaguon eskuela, i man-malañgo yan pas i komunida, pot fabot lai.
