By Miko L. Morelos
Philippine Daily Inquirer
IF YOU’RE GOOD AT TEACHING Bantay how to fetch or play dead, maybe it’s time to amp up the lessons and train him to sniff out contraband or pounce on suspected terrorists.
And the pay is very good, indeed!
Demand for dog handlers for deployment to the Middle East and a surge of election-related jobs in the first half of the year should allay fears of the unemployed about their prospects, according to a human resource specialist.
The national elections in May will “temporarily” trim the unemployment rate in the first six months, especially when the campaign season formally kicks off in February, said Jayjay Viray, managing director of JobsDB.com, an employment website.
Canine handlers are wanted in the United Arab Emirates while engineers, construction workers and information technology (IT) experts continue to be in demand in other parts of the world, she added.
“I learned about this demand [for dog handlers] from a client who is starting a professional school because of the opportunity presented by Dubai,” she said in a recent interview.
“They need something like 10,000 dog handlers for the coming year,” Viray said.
She noted how most establishments in the country already maintain canine units for security, where the dogs are made to sniff through packages in the entrances of malls, hotels and hospitals, among other places.
Though she doesn’t expect the foreign demand for dog handlers to approach the levels of nursing or health care in the past decade, Viray said job seekers should give dog handling more than a second glance.
From what she has heard, she said the job pays about $2,000 a month, roughly P96,000.
Campaign workers
Viray expects a sustained demand for campaign workers next year, particularly online writers and bloggers.
She said outdoor advertising, public relations and manufacturers will thrive from the spending of candidates hitting the campaign trail.
“Election economy is good if you put it to good use,” she said, adding that people should take advantage of the freebies being thrown at them by the candidates like scholarships, training sessions and the like.
The demand for welders, engineers and construction workers will still be brisk next year, she said.
Middle-East demand for welders and for engineers from the oil companies has not slackened and, except for Dubai, which is in financial crisis, construction goes on unabated in the other emirates and the requirement for workers never stops, she said.
In fact, welders are also needed in countries like Canada, Australia and the Philippines, where slots for workers weren’t completely filled at the end of 2009, she said.
For example, she believes the Subic-based Korean shipbuilder Hanjin has not been able to fill its requirement for about 10,000 welders.
Nursing waning
The nursing boom that peaked in the past decade will continue to wane because of stiff competition from other countries, said Viray.
“My forecast is it will go down in three to four years. China is producing nurses too. In the US, with the ongoing health issue, I think they will be prioritizing American nurses before getting outside hires,” she said.
She noted that “Koreans are also into nursing.”
The US Senate and House of Representatives still have to reconcile their versions of the health care bill that seeks to expand coverage to millions of Americans. Legislators hope to have the bill signed into law before President Barack Obama delivers his first State of the Union Address at the end of January.
IT workers
This year’s demand for IT workers will be sustained going into 2010, Viray said.
Like that for welders, the requirement for IT workers for the past two years was not filled by end-2009. This was because of the shortage of capable graduates, she said.
“There are a lot of IT graduates but there are few who are really capable and can understand the language,” she said.
Viray explained that with technology in constant flux, companies have to shorten their projections from five to three years to ensure they are in step with trends.
“When you change your requirement, the skill set of your employees and prospects also change, so the basic computer skills they learned aren’t enough to complete a task,” she said.
Don’t stop studying
What companies need from their potential hires is to keep themselves up-to-date, she said.
“They (IT workers) shouldn’t stop studying. If companies give them the chance to train, that’s the best way to add stripes to their shoulders. That’s how it is in the IT sector,” she said.
Persistence is what Viray thinks is missing in some IT graduates. She pointed out that most Filipino IT workers succeed in Singapore primarily because of the extra hours they put in, studying at night after their day jobs.
“They know what technology demands of them. When they start working there, they are ahead of the locals,” she said.
With competition from other countries which are catching up with the Philippines in the labor export market, the government should look for and establish a niche for its workers, Viray said.
“I think we should stick to our core strength which is IT. Sometime in the 1980s, people here were already talking about computers that had just become popular in the US a decade before,” she said.
