A Desire To Help

About five years back, Cecilia was looking for a job that suited her personality. She wanted to help people find avenues they can excel in, and develop their abilities through their various life stages. Having had a few opportunities to take on human resource management (HRM) responsibilities, she decided this was the area that she would like to develop further.

“Human resource management encompasses a very wide field. But it is essentially about helping people and the organisation,” Cecilia shared. “When I look around me, I see a lot of people having the desire to move to the next stage of their career or in their personal development, and I want to be in the position to help them.”

With that conviction, she took on a management-support role in a medical education organisation, handling human resource matters and sponsorship for Clinicians and Postgraduates.

A Heart For The Underprivileged

When he was younger, Clement was often puzzled when he heard the story of the boy who rescued starfish by throwing them back into the sea. He just could not see how this would help the thousands of starfish that were swept ashore by the currents.

Today, as a social worker, Clement finally understands what the boy was getting at. “Like the boy, we may not be able to help everybody, but the important thing is to help who we can,” Clement reflected. “In Singapore, despite our rapid economic progress, there are families who are left behind and they struggle to keep afloat financially. Though not often in the public eye, their plight is very real and is made worse by the current economic pressures.”

In Clement’s work, he assists families who are in a tight spot financially by helping them apply for short term financial assistance and guiding them in working out a long term plan for self reliance. Besides that, he also provides emotional support, basic counselling, as well as link beneficiaries up with other community resources.

Marathon Job Search

Tertiary-educated Tan Wei Thong, a management professional for 15 years, never believed he would give up his Shanghai job as Business Unit Director with a main-board listed company. But when there were early signs that his two primary school going sons were slackening in their studies, Wei Thong decided to return to Singapore.

“The thought of relocating back to Singapore surfaced when I realised my elder son was struggling with his studies,” he said. “I guessed my wife also missed my pair of extra hands, be it in the children’s education, ferrying them for enrichment courses or sharing the household burden.”

However, it never crossed his mind on the need to be retrained in order to fit into the Singapore workforce. Returning to Singapore after his seven-year overseas stint, stark reality hit him as he endured a heart-breaking eight months before he found a new job.

Giving Older Workers an ADVANTAGE!

There’s a refreshingly new sparkle at St Luke’s Eldercare (SLEC), an extension project of St Luke’s Hospital, and one of the largest eldercare facilities in Singapore. The new buzz comes after they got hold of the ADVANTAGE! Scheme and were able to enhance their work processes for the benefit of their older workers, with more than 40% of its employees aged 55 and above.

Currently, SLEC have 11 centres island wide and has been providing quality day care, active rehab and wellness services to the elderly and seniors in the community since 2001. Since they signed on to the scheme, SLEC has significantly improved the work processes of their staff.

“We’ve benefitted from improvements in the job processes of the employees. Through mechanisation of tasks and the enhancement of the processes, the heavy weight borne by our mature employees is reduced and the overall efficiency and safety have increased,” said SLEC Operations Manager Sia Jia Hui. “This ultimately translates, very significantly, to better care for the elderly.”

‘Forklift’ To A New Life

Mohamed Hardi Bin Abdullah calls it the “turning point in my life” when he passed the five-day forklift driver training course at PSA Corporation. Prior to that, the eight-letter word “forklift” was foreign to him as the 33-year-old was only accustomed to the hotel-service industry, where he was a Bell Captain until his hotel was taken over by a new management in 2009.

“I jumped from one contract job to another, rather aimlessly, as I had to make ends meet at home,” recalled the father of a four-year-old girl, who lives in Jurong West. And it was while working at one of these jobs that he found out that most of his colleagues had a forklift licence.

“I asked them further on the job-scope, career advancement and pay-structure as I was not familiar with the warehouse industry. The more I asked, the more interesting and challenging answers I got,” he said. “I later found out that it cost $500 to obtain a forklift licence. This was way beyond my budget.”

Finance Executive Turned Tourism Ambassador

Five years ago, Vany Ramakrishnan would never have dreamt of working in a resort. “I was working in a bank then and I loved the buzz in the finance world,” Vany recalled. “My job gave me lots of interesting exposure, but I wanted to do something where I could meet and connect with people on a face-to-face level.”

Encouraged by the opportunities and growth in the tourism industry, Vany explored her options for a career switch where she discovered the Professional Conversion Programme (PCP) – which helps professionals switch to new occupations in other industries. On the advice of the PCP consultants from the Tourism Management Institute of Singapore (TMIS), she took up the WSQ Diploma in Tourism to prepare herself for the tourism industry.

“I’m really glad I went through the diploma programme first,” Vany shared. “The course gave me a good understanding of the different facets of tourism and the areas I could work in. On top of that, I had the chance to have some hands-on industrial experience before making the switch. This really increased my confidence when I went for job interviews.”