Job seekers seeking to find jobs in the hotel industry had a shot in the arm when a job fair was held on 7 November 2012 at the Drama Centre in the National Library Building. NTUC e2i (Employment and Employability Institute) together with the Food, Drinks and Allied Workers’ Union (FDAWU) jointly organised the job fair with four participating hotels to offer multi-skilled positions in the hotel sector. Close to 150 job seekers were present to enquire and to seek positions that promised to be flexible and allowed employees to be exposed to different departments within the hotel.
Hospitality and Consumer Business Cluster Lead Yeo Guat Kwang who was present to speak with job seekers and hotel Human Resource representatives noted that there is an effort by all tripartite parties to ensure working arrangements have been re-designed to become more flexible. “I think today’s job fair shows that there are practical solutions for the services sector such as F&B and hotel companies to optimise their manpower resources with innovation and technology to make productivity higher and to make the job better,” said Mr Yeo.
He encouraged companies to join in the bandwagon to re-design and re-create jobs to better attract workers to work with them. “With the tripartite effort, FDAWU has managed to get a number of hotels to pilot this scheme and come up with better jobs and progressive wage to attract workers,” said Mr Yeo.
The four hotels participating in the job fair have re-designed positions to allow employees to have two or more skills to be operational across multiple departments. One of the participating hotels, Amara Singapore Hotels, developed a programme called `Amara MultiOperational Skilled Team’ (AMOST) to enable staff to be trained in areas of F&B and frontoffice departments to ensure their expertise in both areas. “This cross-functional role will make them both versatile and portable across both departments,” said Amara Singapore Hotels Human Resource Manager Karen Goh.
Mr Yang, a job seeker who is currently selfemployed attended the job fair at a time when his own business was slowing down. “I am doing my own business, but the situation is not too good, so I have decided to try finding a job,” said Mr Yang. He added: “I tried looking for other jobs in the engineering sector to no avail although I used to be working in that sector previously. But I am hopeful to find a job today.”
Job seekers can continue to expect more job fairs coming up in the near future as e2i continues to bring jobs closer to the heartlands at its next community job fair on 28 and 29 November 2012 at Sengkang Community Club.
