AsiaLIFE

With so many employers complaining about how difficult it is to find the right people, you might expect there to be fantastic opportunities out there for clever Cambodian graduates? Think again. Words by Johan Smits.

“There’s a huge gap between the skills of graduates and what’s needed on the labour market,” says David Towers who works as a scholarship advisor. “Most students in the city want to become accountants and in the countryside they all want to become doctors or teachers.” It’s an observation shared by different players in this country’s market. According to Kevin Britten from The Secretary, skills relevant to the workplace are in very short supply. In addition wage levels are not driven by market forces. “The commercial sector suffers from the pay and conditions in the NGO sector being much higher,” he says.

Wrong Skill Sets

Relevant skills seem to be lacking to such extent that some potential employers choose to focus on the candidate’s attitude and personality and then train in-house, a recruitment strategy that Price Waterhouse Coopers has adopted here for all of their professional staff. Other employers are acting similarly. Luu Meng is a local businessman who employs around 200 Cambodians in several operations in the hotel and restaurant sector. He believes there’s a need for a good hotel school in Phnom Penh.

“The NGOs do their best and help poor people off the street and back into society,” he says. “But it’s not the same as in a real hotel school where students are already at a certain level from the start and enrol to learn additional professional skills.”

Attitudinal Changes

Some training professionals have picked up on that. Trevor Sworn is Chief Executive of Yejj, an organisation that offers training in IT and hospitality. “There has to be a correlation between training and employment,” he says. “We don’t talk about a job, but about a career.” For over a year now Yejj has been increasing their focus on ‘soft skills.’ This has proved very successful, helping students to develop their interpersonal skills, how to conduct job interviews and how to write a good CV.

Independent trainer and consultant, Lim Vannak, has been training Cambodians since 2003. “It’s about building inner strength, confidence for their future jobs and increasing self-esteem,” he says. “I focus on attitude and on how to attract future employers.” Curran Hendry from AAA agrees. “They have to focus on their communication skills, they have to engage more, come out of their shell, practice interviews etc,” he says. “It’s often a confidence issue.” This is what many employers complain about. Staff are not critical enough. They don’t dare to question their managers. This makes it hard to throw new ideas at them for feedback.

Bridging the Gap

So how to fill that void? “We need a radical overhaul of the education system to include some basic attitude-development courses,” says Kevin. “In terms of vocational training we have a shortage of skills and the ethos of rote-learning becomes totally inappropriate in the context of training, so the training very often is ineffective.”

David is in total agreement. “The education system here is more based on memory and less on critical thinking,” he says. “They’re not used to question their teachers and bosses.” But Vannak is reluctant to point the finger at the universities.“It’s about individual responsibility,” he says. “I’m not sure if students always do their best to improve their abilities. Often they just go there to get their degree, but that’s not enough.”

Student Perspective

What do students themselves think?  Eighteen year-old Linda Nul is studying IT at the University of Cambodia. In the future he would like to open his own centre. “If I do my own business, nobody can blame me,” he says, illustrating the Cambodian difficulty to deal with criticism. However, at the same time there exist a great willingness to learn.

This becomes apparent when talking to Nul and his two fellow students, 28 year-old Pich Sophat and 18 year-old Kun Chan So Thea who are university students in English. All three would jump at the opportunity to work abroad. “It would be better paid,” So Thea thinks. “I can learn from foreign culture and different language,” says Nul. They are very optimistic about finding a job after graduating. “The school will find a job for me,” Sophat says. But is that a realistic expectation?

“For kids coming out of university, it will still be hard,” says Curran. “They come out ill-prepared, which is not their fault. We find that the universities are lacking good initiatives to help their graduates finding jobs.”

Trevor has already acted on that. In 2009 Yejj will start M-Ploy, a dedicated in-house recruiting department to place students in IT and hospitality. One way of building up that much needed experience is working while studying. “There are many university programmes that can be done while working,” says Curran. That’s exactly what Sophat is doing – studying English part-time while working at a Phnom Penh boutique hotel.