Another batch of young people is on the prowl

Jul 05, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

Another school year has come to an end and once more a few thousands have joined the long line awaiting a job in a country where young people believe that there are just no proper paying jobs.
Indeed there are those who seek out the owners of the private sector for a place in the company but my experience tells me that many of the private sector organizations are really not employing. Many have scaled back operations while others are fighting to stay afloat.
I chatted with some of the school leavers the other day and all of them, without exception, were focusing on jobs outside the country. They claimed that they simply could not get a job in Guyana but many fail to accept that they were not properly prepared for the world of work.

Schools simply do not prepare the students for life after school; there are no interviewing preparations; no career guidance courses or sessions and certainly no drills for the real world.
I remember the day I left school. There were tears in my eyes when I walked through the gate for the last time as a student. There was also the fear because I did not know what the future held. I went home and for the first days of the holidays I felt at odds with life because I did not have a schedule.
My parents provided the food but I knew that I had to go out and get a job to help out. I too faced the disappointments of seeking a job with an establishment and hearing that there were no vacancies. I recall the absence of sympathy in the eyes of the people whom I met for the jobs and it was years later I realized that they had seen too many of me.

I applied for a job as a teacher and got two positive responses, one of them from Bartica Anglican School and that was where I went to start working on my birthday, three months after I left school.
I remember the encouragement of Mr Edgar Jordan to enter the Teachers’ Training College to qualify myself. I did. That I did not remain a teacher was because of fifteen dollars more a month and the fact that I had learned to think beyond the everyday things.
Life has been good to me merely because I kept broadening my horizons.
These days, things are somewhat different; there is an expectation on the part of the job seeker to earn top dollars from the outset. There are also distractions. I have heard young men say that they can make much more working a minibus than working in an eight-to-four job.
Some would tell you that they have some relative overseas who is trying to get them out. One girl is still waiting after eight years for her father to file for her and in that time she has not turned a straw because she is going away. I hate to burst her bubble but she is going nowhere.

Parents have a lot to do with what the children do after school. I know some of them seek opportunities to get them out of the house—they send them to computer classes or to the Government Technical Institute or to some private school where for the greater part, they waste time because the school has too many of them.
I have said that many school-leavers can go to the Guyana Police Force or to teaching or even to nursing but the young people with whom I spoke during the past fortnight all declined. “They don’t pay,” they told me.
I asked a few whether they were prepared to sit and do nothing and so earn nothing, or to work and earn something until better can be done. They would do that if they leave this country.
In my day there were no drug dealers; today they are many, all looking for mules with a promise of money. I always say that a slow cent is better than a quick dollar. Kaieteur News needs enterprising people but these are hard to find.

The country needs people who could think for themselves. From my window I see people from rural Guyana peddling things that the city people love and need—fresh greens, pointer brooms, cassava bread and a host of other things. These people are not going to stop now.
The school-leavers are not going to do this because as far as they are concerned, the country owes them a living. I was too hungry to pick and choose so I grabbed the first job that came my way at a whopping $96.50 per month.
The global financial crisis will surely cut back on the small piece that usually came to support the pot. Perhaps this may force a change in attitude in some of the school-leavers.
Indeed, there are about 6,000 of them out there either waiting to be grabbed by the criminal world or trying to make a positive contribution to life in Guyana.

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Another batch of young people is on the prowl

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