BLOGStreet, from JobStreet.com

JECI Poll, May 2009

Are we seeing some early signs of confidence returning to the job market? For the past two months or so, the JobStreet.com Employee Confidence Index (ECI) has given rise to the hope that the worst may be over in this region with continuing encouraging news that the global recession could be slowing down and life has returned to the stock market.

• In Malaysia, the JobStreet ECI climbed higher for the second consecutive month by improving 0.9 point to end April at 47.8 points.
• In Singapore, it was a four-point jump to 42.8 points, the JobStreet ECI's highest level since December last year.
• In the Philippines and India, their JobStreet ECI levels were relatively unchanged at 57.2 points and 56.6 points respectively.
• Meanwhile in Indonesia, there was a slight drop in their JobStreet ECI to 50.8 points.

Snippets: Interview appointments

This is part of a series of articles to make your job hunting experience more meaningful with JobStreet.com.

Do not accept the interview appointment if you are not interested in the job. If you have accepted, please ensure you will make yourself available during that time to attend the interview even if you have found another dream job. 

Do check back on 30 May 2009 for more tips!

Snippets: The best time to look for a new job

This is part of a series of articles to make your job hunting experience more meaningful with JobStreet.com.

Many career experts agree that the best time to look for a new job is while you are still comfortable in your old one. If you are starting to feel unchallenged in your present position, you may be ready for a promotion to the next level. If there aren’t many career advancement opportunities where you work, the best next job may be waiting for you elsewhere. Nowadays, it’s up to you to take control of your professional future and make sure that you are progressing wisely down the right career path.

Do check back on 20 May 2009 for more tips!

Be prepared to start from the bottom

The underlying lesson to learn from this story from JobStreet.com member Choo is that fresh graduates must be prepared to start from the bottom, especially when the economy is faced with a downturn. Start from the bottom and work your way up. Here is his story:

I had just graduated from university in mid-2002 and began my job hunt immediately after my last exam. As a major in banking and finance, I was actively looking for positions in the industry. There were limited positions available and before long, I realized I had to expand my job hunt beyond the industry I was looking for. Interviews were few and far in between.

To reduce the burden on my family, I took on a temporary assignment as a customer service officer with a statutory board. As an hourly rated employee, the monthly pay was half of what a fresh graduate would usually obtain. To keep expenses down, I made a conscious effort to have my meals at coffee shops and staff canteens instead of food courts or fast food restaurants. I also saved on transport by taking a 25-minute walk from my home to the workplace. I was a temporary worker in the day and a professional job hunter by night.

During this period, I was still attending interviews whenever there was an opportunity. However, there were no offers. It was even more demoralizing when I hear of peers who had successfully secured employment. Despite the fact that there were other fresh graduates in similar predicament, it was no consolation. I was constantly tinkering with my resume and cover letter to optimise the chances of an interview. Even though my performance in the statutory board was rated excellent, there were no permanent openings. After six months, the temporary assignment had also come to an end.

Click here to read Choo's tale.

Light at the end of the tunnel

One of our members, Low, went through some hard times when he was retrench in 1999. He tried to keep the bad news away from his wife while he went about to find a new job. Looking back on those trying days, Low said that it wasn't easy to pretend that he was still working.

I started my career in Jan 1980 as a technician and slowly moved up the corporate ladder, having a few job switches along the way. Eventually I became a manager in June 1991. I was very happy but before long, in March 1999, I was retrenched. I was told to pack and leave the company immediately. I have never tasted recession prior to this and I was totally lost and depressed.

Upon reaching home, I did not tell my wife and presumed my normal work routine the next workday. I woke up early, dressed up and left for "work". I sat at a fast food restaurant with a set of newspaper, browsing through the Straits Times Recruit section. Days passed by and I still could not find a job. I remembered looking forward to the weekend because there would be a "thicker" recruit section. However, I often found nothing suitable and was left disappointed and demoralised.

Another "work week" ahead was a scary thought.

One day, my hand phone rang and an old friend called and said he found out of my retrenchment.....

Click here to read his whole story.

Managing your emotional health

Your emotions can get the better of you if you are not aware or not strong enough to meet them. During this period of economic slowdown, it's quite possible that many person will have conflicting emotions. How can you prepare yourself for the waves of emotions sweeping you? Here. one of our members, Gilbert Goh, tells us what he went through:

I count myself lucky to have survived two tough years of unemployment with mounting financial problems during the period after 9/11 right up to the SARS epidemic. My family had just returned from overseas as we were away for a year on study purposes. The situation was made worse when we decided to buy a private house burdened with a mortgage loan. It was one of my worst personal decisions.

Although my wife works, it was tough to make ends meet with only one income. We also had a young daughter to raise. I faced sleepless nights trying to meet the minimum income payments for all my credit facilities especially when the bank account dried up. There was an unforgettable day when my ATM bank account showed a balance of less than $20. The worst moments of my life came when I had to borrow cash from friends to tide over. This is when you realise who your true friends are and whether they will stand by you when you are almost down and out. To this day, I am thankful to the few who volunteered financial assistance to me during this trying period.

During that period, I hovered between desperation and panic. Naturally, the relationship with my wife was not at its best. We often argued over financial matters.

Click here to read Gilbert's full story.

Penang career assistance and training centre launched

Our background information tells us that the Penang government had been closely monitoring the fallouts from the global financial mess and the economic downturn since last year. Of course, the effects had become much more critical in the last five or six months, not only in Penang but all over the country.

The spectre of people losing their jobs and new graduates being unable to find jobs during this trying period has spurred the Penang government to launch the Penang Career Assistance and Training Centre (Penang CAT Centre) a few days ago to assist and match retrenched workers and job seekers in the state with employment opportunities. This initiative from the government will help to create job and business opportunities in addition to matching retrenched workers or new workers with training programmes.

The CAT Centre is managed by investPenang with support from the Penang Development Corporation, Penang Island Municipal Council, Seberang Perai Municipal Council and the Penang Water Supply Corporation.

If you want more information, please call 018-4652043, 018-4656410, 018-4659384 or 018-4651635. There's also their website where you can download the registration form.

Alternatively, the Penang CAT Centre is open Mondays to Fridays from 10am to 6pm at 1B 11-02-03 and 1B 11-02-05, Level 2 KOMTAR, 10000 PENANG. Office hours on Saturdays will be until 1pm. Do pay them a visit if you need their assistance.

Persistence pays

JobStreet.com member Joseph Ong shares with us his experience during a time when he was desperately looking for a job. Persistence paid off for him, he said, and it's a lesson which many of us may want to learn too. Here is his story:

I joined the workforce after graduating with a degree in Banking & Finance in end 1999.

My first employment was a six-month contract assignment in the Finance department of an MNC. After the assignment expired, I continued to send out countless CVs to Banks and Financial Institutions. However, after more than 10 interviews for various positions in different Banks and Financial Institutions, I was still unemployed.

During that time, I took on various temporary/hourly pay assignments doing general admin for a couple of months before I finally struck a deal with a recruitment specialist from one of the employment agencies, which eventually resulted in me being with my current employer for almost 8.5 years.

The recruitment specialist needed a temporary staff to assist in a three-day assignment with a company that was in the process of relocating its office. As she explained to me, it was going to be hard work - moving big cardboard boxes of stuff from the office to the storeroom on my own the entire day for the next three days - for $5/hr. No one else before me was willing to take on this job. So I took the opportunity to strike a deal with the recruitment specialist. My condition was that I was willing to help her with this assignment if she could help assign me to the next available job in a bank - any job in any bank (I was that desperate to get into the industry).

Click here to read Joseph's full story.

Staying positive

JobStreet.com member Kum Cheong shares with us his experience of recession: what is it to him and how he got out of the last one.

Recession - a dreaded but unavoidable economic condition that no one wants to be part of. Just like what goes up must come down, an economic boom must necessarily be followed by an economic downturn or recession, which is what we are currently experiencing.

A few years back in 2003 when Singapore was struck by the SARS virus, our shaky economy, still reeling from the dot-com burst and post-911 events, went into an immediate tail-spin. As a result, unemployment rates soared to unprecedented levels.

During that time, I was unemployed for a total of eight consecutive months before I found a suitable part-time job and eventually I decided to return to school for higher education.

Having never directly gone through a recession before this, it was by far the darkest and loneliest eight-month period of my life. It was a harrowing experience but at the same time brought out a new whole side of me that I have never seen before. It completely changed my perspective of life from then on.

Click here to read the full story from him.

Social networking sites coming into their own

People used to think of social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter as, well, websites that allow them to add friends and strangers to their expanding online social network and nothing more.

However, the global economic downturn has given these sites a new perspective. People are beginning to use them as a means for job opportunities.

According to an article by Julia Angwin in The Wall Street Journal, those annoying people who want to be your "friend" may come in very handy when you want to look for a job or a new career.

"Friends" on online social networks, says Angwin, are just "weak ties". They are basically acquaintances that form an important bridge between your close friends. And weak ties are particularly good for job searching because acquaintances can expose a job candidate to a much wider range of possibilities than his or her close friends can.

She wrote about a man who was looking for a developer for one of his startup companies. In the past, this person would conduct informal job hunts by sending out emails to his friends but within days of changing his Facebook status update to "Looking for a rails developer who likes to chat about sports",  his acquaintances had forwarded him two candidates for the job. "The two people I got the leads from were not people I would have thought to include (in an email)," he said.

Click here to read the full story.