School sendoff

Commencement –-the end of one thing and the start of another, so said a comic book character.

By now, most of Cebu’s schools have held their graduation rites for college students, who for better or worse, will soon take their chances in the increasingly competitive labor market.

This stark reality hits graduates a few days after the euphoria of commencement exercises and graduation parties have died down. This is especially true for college graduates whose families pawned their land, valuables or farm animals to fund their education.

Or this won’t immediately be the case for those with well-off parents who can afford to tell their sons and daughters to take a prolonged vacation before taking stock of their options and applying for jobs in the private and government sector.

Managing to graduate a course or even high school is no small achievement in a country where families with ever smaller budgets often find the cost and quality of education not commensurate to the blood, sweat and tears shed for their offspring’s future.

Now that they’ve finished, new graduates have options to land a job in the country or or abroad or start a new business.

Cebu, which has experienced a boom in the business outsourcing industry, will need all the qualified English-literate talent available to feed call centers and knowledge-based process outsourcing companies that to date, employ 75,000 workers, and still struggle to find more.

The fact that one can land a BPO job with barely two years in college is both encouraging and disturbing.

It’s an early opportunity for young persons to get valuable work experience and earn at least P15,000 a month.

It’s disturbing because time and labor demands of the industry mean graveyard shifts and picking up high-pressure habits of consuming more caffeine, cigarettes and processed food than is good for you.

And for call centers, with high turnover rates that have employees hopping from company to another for better pay alone or just to avoid taking nasty calls from foreign clients, the work can soon resemble an assemblyline of the brightest, most communication-savvy urban warriors wondering what happened to self fulfillment.

Whatever the job prospects, it’s enough for now that they’ve graduated from school.

Not everyone gets that chance to gain the tools needed to make a better life for oneself and family.

The search for a financially rewarding job has begun. We wish them the best of luck.