WHEN my eldest son lost his job in July, he applied for jobs with quite a number of companies, big and small.
He attended a few job interviews but received no callbacks. One position advertised on Facebook turned out to be bogus.
My son, like thousands of other young men and women in the prime of their life, is now jobless. Many are clueless about how to restart their careers and, the least to say, find a job that can keep them afloat in these hard times.
With car and housing loans to pay, they're without a source of income, except for their meagre savings.
Many have decided to live with their parents. Some don't have enough money to even start a micro business.
Now that we're going through the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has left these young men and women struggling to find jobs, even low-paying positions.
Many, particularly in the Klang Valley, stopped scouring the Internet for jobs when the government imposed another round of the Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO).
Although the labour market is looking bleak, programmes like Prihatin and Penjana or financial institutions' extension or restructuring of loan repayments are a godsend to the unemployed and retrenched.
These safety net measures are understandably impermanent as they will be taken away once the job market recovers. A few d ays ago, I read a news report online saying that the Social Security Organisation (Socso) predicted there would be more than 100,000 Malaysians who will be out of a job by the end of the year, in a worst-case scenario.
Socso chief executive officer Mohammed Azman Aziz was quoted as saying it was based on the prediction of the current trajectory of job losses with almost 10,000 people losing their jobs every month throughout the year.
It appears that Socso received 89,596 reports of lost employment up to Oct 22, an increase of 278 per cent compared with the same period last year. The majority of job losses are in the Klang Valley, at 58 per cent, with Selangor and Kuala Lumpur seeing 27,619 and 23,882 cases of job losses, respectively.
Penang is third highest with 9,489, or 11 per cent of the total. When the government imposed the CMCO, Socso noticed that the job losses began to spike from May and the figure spiked again in July when the Recovery MCO began.
The manufacturing sector is the worst hit with 20,492 people losing their jobs. Those in the accommodation and food and beverage industries lost reportedly 13,053 and 12,450 jobs, respectively. In terms of occupation,the professional category is the most affected, with 23,022 cases (26 per cent), followed by technicians with 17,240 (19 per cent) and managerial positions with 11,762 (13 per cent).
The way forward is to create opportunities for the unemployed to be reskilled and upskilled. The Human Resources Development Fund's (HRDF) new economic recovery initiative, Penjana HRDF training incentive programme, focuses on generating jobs and training.
The government, through this scheme, emphasises training in terms of reskilling and upskilling to boost the employability of the unemployed, implemented through collaborations with ministries and agencies.
HRDF, at the same time, seeks qualified partners in delivering the initiatives crafted as part of the short- to medium- term Covid-19 economic recovery plan, specifically related to job placement, entrepreneurship, self-employment and market driven Fourth Industrial Revolution training.
For the unemployed or retrenched, I'd say don't be disheartened. Get yourselves reskilled and upskilled as this is one excellent opportunity to get back on your feet.
The writer, a former NST journalist, is now a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food haunts in the country