The NTUC Women’s Development Secretariat (WDS) regularly reviews the employment landscape and makes regular assessments for its job fairs based on the feedback from its pool of female job-seekers. Among its database of over 2,000 female job seekers, at least 65 per cent or over 1,300 female job seekers indicated their preference for administrative and other office positions. These jobs generally offer stable working conditions and regular working hours, let them better manage their time between work and family commitments.
Hence, the NTUC WDS held its Back2Work (B2W) with U Job Fair today, targeted mainly at women job seekers, who want a dedicated offering of office-based work opportunities.
The job fair, held at the Devan Nair Institute for Employment and Employability, offered administrative and customer service vacancies in an office-based environment, with most having office working hours between 8.00am and 6.00pm.
A total of 16 companies offered close to 300 job vacancies at the job fair, with salaries ranging from $1,200 to $4,000. The participating employers and agencies spread across a wide range of industries including hospitality, retail and healthcare sectors, among others.
Cleaning Express Pte Ltd (CEPL) is one of the employers at the job fair, which was offering seven job vacancies including administrative positions and customer service executives, with salary up to $2,200. “In this tight labour market, SME companies like us face difficulties in attracting office staff. Therefore, we need to be more creative and welcome other avenues to improve our recruitment and selection strategies, and maximise the full potential of the workforce. We believe in giving equal opportunities as long as the candidates have a positive mindset to adapt to the working environment, willing to learn, and meet the expectations of their job responsibilities and company requirements,” said Ms Malliga, Human Resource Manager, CEPL.
The NTUC WDS also help prepare job seekers for their job opportunities. Particularly, for job seekers who do not have work experience in customer service but is keen to join the contact centres as customer service officers, NTUC WDS has partnered Republic Polytechnic’s Academy for Continuing Education (ACE@RP) to roll out a 3-day customised workshop to prepare them for frontline positions in the contact centres. Using a variety of teaching methodologies, the workshop introduced participants to a contact centre environment and inculcated the mindset for creating good customer experiences and skills for a successful career in contact centres. 24 female job seekers have attended the workshop and found it beneficial to them so far.
Attracting more women back to the workforce
Since the (B2W) with U Programme started in 2007, NTUC WDS has successfully reached out to 70,000 women and assisted about 23,000 of them with jobs placements.
NTUC WDS continues to urge employers to be more proactive and innovative when it comes to attracting this potential pool of economically inactive women back to work. “As the labour market remains tight in Singapore, employers need to understand and look at offering flexible work arrangements or job re-design for these women whose main concerns include family care arrangements, aside fair remuneration package and work benefits. This is win-win for both employers and job seekers, as companies would have manpower resources, while the job seekers would find employment,” said Ms Sylvia Choo, Director of NTUC WDS.
Moving forward, NTUC WDS will continue to work closely with employers and partner different agencies to bring across more employment and training opportunities to benefit more women job seekers.
New efforts would include holding a series of thematic job fairs offering women-friendly positions over the next one year and on a quarterly basis. The upcoming job fairs will focus on flexi-work positions from the “Best Companies for Mums” awardees, suitable vacancies for mature workers, and job opportunities that are within their neighbourhood or require less than half an hour travelling time to the workplace. Each of these job fairs aims to offer at least 500 job vacancies from different employers.
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