Recently, I noticed a candy kiosk at the mall where three cleaver-wielding men were chopping long sticks of hard candy into tiny pieces. People were gathered about them, watching the process. I wondered about the kind of physical and mental strain that the workers had to go through during their long shifts doing that kind of repetitive manual labor. I wondered, too, what kind of educational requirement was needed for someone to get a job like that.
A friend was recently talking about how employers in the Philippines have the outdated habit of requiring inappropriate qualifications from potential employees. For example, requiring a college diploma just to be able to sell chicken; or looking for fair skinned applicants to fill in a post in the retail market. Some of these qualifications are biased and downright absurd.
Things like these—being overqualified at work, lack of training, unchallenging or meaningless labor—are causing disengagement in the workplace. Some of the symptoms are a low morale, dead eyes and uninspired action, slow thinking and ideas that are blah, spending too much time staring into space, chatting, or being engaged in unproductive activities. A WE Forum article described this group of employees as the “zombie work force”.
Aside from making the employee unfulfilled and unhappy, disengagement also hurts the business and the community in general. For businesses, this translates to quicker/higher turnover, more absenteeism and lower customer satisfaction. Companies lose money and opportunities, which eventually leads to a decline in national growth and development. It could lead further to a loss in economic competitiveness, which hurts the national economy in a big way.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Human Capital Report of 2017, only 62 percent of global human capital is currently developed. Experts are putting the blame on workers’ anxiety about modern changes in the economy and the workplace, i.e., the nature of jobs is changing and machines are taking the center stage. People feel less secure in their jobs, leading to less motivation, indifference and disengagement. The lack of adequate training is also an issue. Employees have to step up in terms of skills and capabilities as roles and job conditions change very quickly. If they can’t keep up, they get left behind. In the Philippines, for example, low wages and dismal work conditions are primary factors in the growing job insecurity.
One solution lies in becoming a lifelong learner, which can be loosely defined as someone who engages in learning activities throughout one’s life, “with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competencies within a personal, civic, social and/or employment-related perspective”.
Experts advise engaging in a regular exercise of self-assessment where one’s skills are sincerely reviewed for marketability and usefulness. If they are not up to par, then a decision needs to be made on how to increase one’s income potential to face the challenges of the present and future. The “half-life of a job skill is about five years;” so, to stay in the game, one would ideally work to get ahead before his/her value declines.