When the songbird sings

I sat at a round-table discussion with graduating students from St. Paul University – Manila last Saturday. Not knowing what exactly I was supposed to talk about since the only information that I received was from an e-mailed invitation to workers from the tech sector forwarded by Joeyboy. In a nutshell, the sender was looking for pe0ple to talk about trends in the I.T. industry. I decided to give it a shot. An hour before the talk was supposed to begin I hastily listed a few things I gathered from previous research, particularly those touching on web 2.0 and related services.

It turned out that the round table discussion wasn’t necessarily an exchange of opinions about I.T. issues, but more of an occasion to orally strut about the fabulousness of being in the industry, like, Hell yeah—we are awesomely awesome, we tech lot! Call it an orientation of sorts by a group of people who work for I.T. companies–doing marketing/tech writing, programming, development, training and whatnot—to starry-eyed CompSci students who were about to furnish their resumes and have their very first taste of the job-hunting process.

An “agenda” screen was put on a wall to guide the students and their career counselors—us, fabulous tech ants—in Q&A. The questions included:

1. What are the trends, prospects and opportunities in the industry?
2. What are the demands of the [job] market:
   • professional qualifications?
   • new knowledge and skills?
3. What is the current corporate culture?
   • best practices
   • issues and concerns in the workplace
   • working environment

I shared the table with an information manager from the local government department. One of the differences touched on the issue of pay. He (I forgot his name) informed the students at our table that the government had put a cap on its employees’ salaries. On the other hand, people in the private sector—especially I.T.—have brighter financial prospects. I don’t earn a lot, but hey, at least many of people I know do. Career advancement through trainings and certifications are also among the perks that private sector workers can get. And as those things don’t come in cheap, companies are going to milk their trained workers for all they’re worth through bonds that last from six to 24 months.

Mr. Government eventually told everyone that it wasn’t all about the pay anyway, but one’s passion for the job. In this I had to agree. At the end of the day, it wasn’t about what the students’ parents wanted them to take, but what they were passionate about…unless their folks disowned them for wanting to do something else instead of staying in the, say, line of family business. They just had to cross our fingers that this passion thing wouldn’t necessarily equate crappy paychecks.

As for item #3, each company has a culture of its own, which is further defined by the sub-cultures formed by and among various project groups. But if a general assessment was required, I guess the only thing that these sheltered kids needed was to apply for their first SSS cards before heading off to their first interview with, say, Accenture, Headstrong, MySis or our company.

The career coaching roundtable talk also involved graduating Hotel and Restaurant Management students, so the organizers also invited people who worked for a couple of hotels and a restaurant chain. If it were up to me, I would have of course done a separate event for the other set of graduating studetns. It made me wonder if the university was having budget problems, that was why the organizers had to do a 2-in-1 orientation for schoolgirls taking two entirely different courses. On the other hand, SPU was a Catholic educational institution that didn’t charge tuition fees too cheaply.

At the event’s closing, each of the resource persons (read: career coaches?) received a token bottle of wine and a certificate of participation. Mine still has to be sent to me because it lacked a signature. Joeyboy and I joked that they could instead scan the document and send it by email.

Update: Here are the photos

I can’t get darned FilmLoop to create a bigger button, so I’ll have to fix it later. In the meantime, here are smallish photos from the event: