My Encounter With A Job Placement Executive

[Subconscious]

HI bros and sis,

Been reading the great stories here for a while and thought it's high time I contributed. This will be the first in a series of stories from me - All are real encounters, though the names and specifics have been changed for obvious reasons.

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I graduated in 15 years ago from a local university with a computer engineering degree. Graduating in the midst of a recession meant I was jobless for several months. Many of my fellow schoolmates, I noticed, secured jobs very easily. But they were willing to do something I hated most: Software programming. Yeah, those days, if you were good or were just willing to face the lit rectangular box that was a computer monitor and type away incessantly for hours on end, you would be almost guaranteed a job - Fast. But no, programming wasn't for me, and back then, I would rather have gone hungry than to do something that was on the lowest rung of my ladder of desired jobs.

Fast forward to a year later... I had been in the local system integrator for a year. The Systems Engineer job was not the best job in the world, but at least I was not doing programming for a living. I installed Novell Netware servers for a major government organisation. It was coming to Year 2000 and most companies, big and small, were quickly rolling out projects to replace their servers or perform updates on the same, just so that the ticking of the clock on 31 Dec 1999 at midnight would go smoothly. One could only imagine the horrors that would have ensued had this essential exercise not been implemented. So for the past year, I had faithfully gone round to the different government sites to set up, test, and hand over the NetWare servers to the beaming clients, who now felt safe that their in-house operations (not to mention secrets) would be safe from catastrophe.

I was now itching to do something different. While I thought I had always wanted a Systems Engineer job, it now seemed to lack the kick I was looking for. A quick word with my manager landed me a marketing role in the company. I sold computer software for a while, and enjoyed meeting people and spoke on weekly phone calls with the Canadian principal, but it too, failed to ignite the passion in me. Back then, fresh out of university, I had barely explored anything in the harsh real world, and anybody would expect that one would not have found one's direction then. I thought I had an interest in the telecommunications industry, not least brought by the liberalisation of the Singapore telecoms market in 2000. I joined no less than three companies - An equipment solutions provider, followed by a service provider, then another service provider, in all of Year 2000 alone. Looking back, my resume looked terrible, but being a brash, young lad just starting to leave his mark in the corporate world, I could not care less. All I wanted was to do something I liked, or so I thought.

[koebshaq0_0]

Pitching my tent here

[Subconscious]

By the end of 2000, I realised I could not take it anymore. I wasn't going anywhere in my third sales job. I had realised my dream of entering the telecoms world, but my sales figures were hardly impressive. Perhaps sales was not for me? So, for the umpteenth time, I found myself flipping through Saturday's Recruit pages and updating my CV on Microsoft Word again. This time, I made the decision to go back to IT. Though it did not make me big bucks, at least it was something I was familiar with. Why, at least it would be something that offered some sense of stablity, after all the job-hopping in the past 12 months. If I endured things a little, doing what I was supposed to do, perhaps I would make it to a Team Leader. Or I might even be tasked to lead projects as a Project Manager! After a month of searching, I finally received a job offer. I was to be a Roving Engineer charged with the maintenance of computers systems in various government installations. I accepted the offer immediately. At long last, I could heave a sigh of relief! IT, IT all the way, I told myself. That very afternoon, I was walking happily in the Raffles Place MRT underground tunnel, revelling in the joy of having found a job, when a phone call arrived.

"Hello, is that John? This is Sharon, calling from Abacus Recruitment Services. We have shortlisted you for the position of a Sales Executive with SHN Food Trading Ltd. Would you be able to drop by for a meetup?"