Article Source: http://goo.gl/RK9xT9
I had the opportunity to be involved in an outplacement exercise recently.
The company in the financial sector had to downsize their operational staffs and about a dozen staff were affected.
One of them had been with the company for more than 10 years; another one (let’s call him Peter*) was very close to reaching his 25-year anniversary.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen as he and his colleagues were recently retrenched.
Lack of career advisory before 2000s
If you look back at the history of career advisory in Singapore, career advisories only came along in the early 2000s.
WDA was formed in Sep 2003 and e2i only in 2008.
The generation of professionals that were already out in the workforce at that time has little, if not none, career planning.
And given the prevalence of lifelong employment by the organizations then, professionals naturally didn’t have the desire or motivation to skill up.
When the downsizing occurred, most were not prepared especially in the face of skills obsolescence and irreversible macroeconomic changes.
Increasing number of retrenchments in Singapore
The recent spate of retrenchments is increasing by the day. And the situation causing these retrenchments appears to be different from the ones we have seen before.
In the various cyclical unemployment periods we had before, we faced a sudden dip in demand for goods and services. Companies possessed too many goods or overcapacity to produce, but couldn’t find enough buyers.
After taking a tighter control on expenses temporarily to balance the books, things would go back to normal once the dust has settled.
If you look deeper into the reasons for unemployment we are having now, they are very structural in nature.
Job losses in the various industries are gone and won’t be coming back
And why do we need tripartite guidelines on managing excess manpower? Read the full article here: http://goo.gl/RK9xT9
I had the opportunity to be involved in an outplacement exercise recently.
The company in the financial sector had to downsize their operational staffs and about a dozen staff were affected.
One of them had been with the company for more than 10 years; another one (let’s call him Peter*) was very close to reaching his 25-year anniversary.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen as he and his colleagues were recently retrenched.
Lack of career advisory before 2000s
If you look back at the history of career advisory in Singapore, career advisories only came along in the early 2000s.
WDA was formed in Sep 2003 and e2i only in 2008.
The generation of professionals that were already out in the workforce at that time has little, if not none, career planning.
And given the prevalence of lifelong employment by the organizations then, professionals naturally didn’t have the desire or motivation to skill up.
When the downsizing occurred, most were not prepared especially in the face of skills obsolescence and irreversible macroeconomic changes.
Increasing number of retrenchments in Singapore
The recent spate of retrenchments is increasing by the day. And the situation causing these retrenchments appears to be different from the ones we have seen before.
In the various cyclical unemployment periods we had before, we faced a sudden dip in demand for goods and services. Companies possessed too many goods or overcapacity to produce, but couldn’t find enough buyers.
After taking a tighter control on expenses temporarily to balance the books, things would go back to normal once the dust has settled.
If you look deeper into the reasons for unemployment we are having now, they are very structural in nature.
Job losses in the various industries are gone and won’t be coming back
And why do we need tripartite guidelines on managing excess manpower? Read the full article here: http://goo.gl/RK9xT9
