You probably have been looking for a job for a long time without success. You chose a career field to study only to find out that there are no or minimal jobs in that field. You went to university or college and a course was chosen for you by your guardians. This coming week one of the leading audit firm will be realizing a report dubbed the annual human resource survey. Last year the report indicated very worrying trends but we have also carried our own survey that almost tallies with the one from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The market trends in the human capital field are changing very fast like the money markets. Just as a sneak preview, in the list of the richest men on earth, you won’t guess but at least 20% are guys from IT, 50% from oil industry and the rest are self made entrepreneurs. To get rich is not a matter of profession but your personal attributes and as I start this article, just as a reminder, you can never be wealthy from employment and I don’t mean rich because the two terms are relative. To be rich is to attain some liquidity levels while to be wealthy is to have an asset base that is unmatchable including the human capital asset.
Here we will be citing popular courses and tell you the trends in the market:
1. Bachelor of Commerce: - In this field, we will be talking about accounting, finance, administration, sales and marketing, HR, management science and insurance. This is the most popular course both in college and university. The trend is that most job seekers come from this field because back in the 1990s it was dabbed as the next big thing and people went rushing there and remember the laws of demand and supply, ‘once the supply goes high than the demand, the price will fall’ and that explains why this days, accountants are paid very poorly when a few years ago they used to be at the top. This is the most flexible field and movements of staff contributes to a very high turnover rate especially from auditing firms to accounting for organizations. Although some professions under this field remain highly paying like marketing especially when you land at the right place, insurance when you combine your degree with a few professional insurance papers. When moving into commerce be aware that the market is saturated and thus trade cautiously on what to specialize while looking into the future. Just think about it, when will it come to a time that an accountant earns above a line manager – never. This is seen as fast way to get a job but think of the longevity of your career.
2. Bachelor of Education:- The main employer in this area is the government. I don’t know why, but most people who take this course, go back to their village and take up BOG jobs while waiting to take up government advertised jobs – mistake. Teaching is among the most dynamic professions. Don’t just sit there waiting to be paid Ksh. 30,000 this tells us that your ambitions are very low and you belong to a class of employees who depend on the medical cover and waiting for meagre pension at the end of their career. Please be dynamic and change yourself to a more useful person in your life, apply for jobs for editorial work, publishing if you have done languages, get jobs in private schools and international schools, they pay far much better than the government. Please don’t look at job security, that means you don’t trust your performance. The airline industry prefers people who have done this course because of their charisma to talk to people and thus you can easily get a job along these lines. If you have done anything in the education industry, I will advise you to be sharp.
3. Bachelor of Science:- I will combine a lot of technical courses here from engineering, actuarial, environmental, social sciences, statistics and medical sciences. This is a technical field where jobs are occupied by very old people that don’t want to move on because they know how to operate a machine. Apart from actuarial science where the field is growing and everyone rushing there, the other areas are quite open. These are technical courses and there will always be jobs but the rate at which they are created is very slow because the turnover rate is very low which sometimes forces graduates from this field to pursue other areas easily. I know some audit firms that like taking up engineers to auditing and pay for their CPA or ACCA. In environmental sciences, biological and any other can be very lucrative if you land the right job with an NGO but all I can advise in this field is patience with a small job while looking for a future of great money.
4. Other technical courses from polythenics and university colleges:- This is where most employers will get and engineer or a person to do a very technical job for a small salary. They think that most graduates from polys will take the jobs gladly. Please have some pride and teach these people a lesson by not rating yourself very cheaply. Jobs in this area will always be there although very few because they are occupied by very old people, just get in and displace them slowly by portraying your competence. A friend of mine get a job in Akamba buses sometime in 2008, his relationship was ok with colleagues who were very old until he proposed for computers to be brought in to make the work easier. Get into the industry and change the way things are done using very old machines by changing into new ones. Be careful though and employer may be coming from the old times and may resist change. What we advise in this field is that create your own job.
We may have not tackled all field and we realize that the space and time will not allow that but next week we shall carry an article, ‘ the good, the bad and the ugly’ which will show you the bad popular jobs in the Kenyan market which you should avoid.
Watch out for it and we wish you all the best.
