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There are a few job fairs held recently at downtown. Its aim is apparently to recruit suitable candidates to fill up the job vacancies. But I was told that most of those jobs are recruitment from the service and non-technical sectors. 

A few of my colleagues were interested to go to the JobDB job fair which is held at Suntec City from 20-22 March. Some of them said that they were planning to go to the job fair in the early morning so as to have a better chance of landing a job 🙂

Well, I think it is no harm going to the job fair and see how bad the global economic downturn is affecting the local people. So, I went there to find it out myself in the late afternoon on Friday.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t a big crowd when I reached there although I had expected it to be overwhelmed with job-seekers. The visitors or job-seekers were required to register themselves at the counter before they were allowed to enter the exhibition hall.

I did a quick registration and then showed the entry pass to the security guard before going in to the job fair hall. I was immediately attracted by the voice of a speaker who was giving his presentation on job-seeking techniques.

So, I went to listen to his job-seeking talk teaching job-seekers about the skills that they need to have when writing a resume as well as attending a job interview. Well, I think this talk was useful and informative enough to help job-seekers to do the preparation.

Then, I walked around and browsed through most of the booths after listening to the talk. To my surprise, 30-40% of the booths were not recruitment booths but institutional booths to get people to sign up for their courses.

 The promoters told the job-seekers that this is a good time to upgrade themselves so that they will become more employable when the economy becomes good again.

However, I think the immediate need of job-seekers, especially for those people who have been retrenched recently, is to get a job first rather than to spend money to further their studies. 

If the people don’t even have the salary to bring money back home or pay for the bills, how they will have the money to pay for the course fee then.

In my opinion, job fair might not be a good place to find a job for those people who have been retrenched or for those people who still have a job but wish to change job. 

Therefore, I don’t really recommend my friends to go to job fairs to try their luck.