Today, the NTUC Women’s Development Secretariat (WDS) held its first major Back2Work with U Job Fair for the year at the Nee Soon East Community Centre. At the job fair, Mr Patrick Tay, MP for Nee Soon GRC and Director of PMEs (Professionals, Managers and Executives) and Legal Services, NTUC launched the mobile recruitment vehicle – “Jobs on Wheels for U”, which is a new recruitment effort and pilot project by WDS to broaden its outreach to women job seekers in the heartland areas as well as around Singapore.
Launch of “Jobs on Wheels for U”
NTUC WDS traditionally reaches out to the women job seekers through its bi-annual job fairs and weekly recruitment drives at fixed locations. In order to broaden its effort and connect more women job seekers to potential employment opportunities, WDS’s first mobile recruitment vehicle “Jobs on Wheels for U” project has been mooted and created by the WDS team.
Starting from July 2012, “Jobs on Wheels for U” will travel to a different location once a week, each time bringing at least 500 job opportunities to women job seekers who stay in the vicinity. WDS will be working with various partners including the Community Development Councils (CDC), other community agencies, the e2i (Employment and Employability Institute) as well as direct employers, to provide suitable job opportunities for the female residents in the various locations. The target is to bring in more full-time and part-time job opportunities that are located near where the women job seekers stay, which also offer competitive remuneration packages.
This “Jobs on Wheels for U” pilot run would be held over three months from July to October 2012. The mobile vehicle will first roll off with the North West zone and proceed to cover the rest of the zones. Going forward, regular reviews will be made with the intent of making this project a long-term one.
“The idea of having a mobile recruitment vehicle for these women job seekers is a brilliant and a very thoughtful one. “Jobs on Wheels for U” brings jobs opportunities closer to the women job seekers who face difficulties in looking for jobs due to their family commitments. Without having to travel too far or be away from home for too long, they are still able to get access to good job opportunities,” Mr Patrick Tay, MP for Nee Soon GRC and Director of PMEs and Legal Services, NTUC commented.
NTUC WDS Back2Work with U Job Fair
About 1,000 job vacancies from 11 different employers were available at today’s one-day job fair, which primarily targets women job seekers. Participating employers came from various sectors such as healthcare, financial, security, administrative, education and transport and logistics, etc.
As WDS continues to place much focus on placing women in better jobs, the job fair featured employers who can offer at least median pay in their respective sectors. These job opportunities, which are mostly for the rank-and-file, consist of both full-time and part-time positions.
To prepare these women job seekers for such vacancies, WDS also held two training sessions where talks and tips as well as knowledge on the different sectors were shared to help prepare them for interviews at the job fair.
Continuous efforts by WDS
“Both the Back2Work with U Job Fair and the “Jobs on Wheels for Women” project are part of WDS’ 3R – Recruit, Re-adjust and Retain – strategy to help women who want to enter or re-enter workforce. Through the latest initiative, we also hope that it can further raise the awareness of WDS’ initiatives and programmes. By creating more and better platforms through continuous idea development and innovation, we can better reach out and help more women in our communities,” Ms Sylvia Choo, Director of WDS added.
As Singapore continues to face a tight labour market amidst the gloomy economic outlook, WDS urged employers to be more flexible and innovative when it comes to recruitment so that they can better tap the potential pool of economically inactive women who want to come back to work.
Other than offering more flexi-work arrangements which include part-time positions or home-based positions, employers can also look at job re-design to see how they can make work more attractive to this potential pool of women job seekers. Naturally, these should be coupled with fair remuneration package and work benefits.
