00:00 The new year is coming up and this means new job trends.
00:04 What is the outlook for 2024?
00:05 Let's ask the founder of Eventist Search Asia, Yu Ming Chin.
00:10 Yu Ming, great to have you with us.
00:12 Thank you, thank you Rico.
00:13 All right, we still have a very high unemployment rate of more than 4%.
00:18 Close to 3 million people are out of jobs.
00:20 But of course, the economy is growing, it's expanding.
00:24 What are the job trends for 2024?
00:26 Well, I would say, hopefully there will be a strong pickup of growth sector or rebound sector,
00:35 like the hospitality and retail and even perhaps construction to cover for the infrastructure backlog
00:45 that have taken place over the past three pandemic years.
00:50 You know, hospitality, that's their tourism sector.
00:53 We have more than 7,600 islands, more tourists are now visiting the Philippines.
00:59 We will definitely need more people.
01:01 Retail, Filipinos love to shop.
01:03 Correct.
01:03 But we are also losing people in both sectors abroad.
01:08 So it's almost like a zero-sum game to a larger extent.
01:12 But we're seeing this administration continuing to attract new investments into the country.
01:21 There are more than, what, close to 90 billion US dollars in investment pledges
01:26 with President Marcos visiting various countries over the past 18 months.
01:30 Isn't this now already translating into new jobs?
01:33 That's right.
01:34 And we see some very interesting, what I call, new growth industries.
01:40 I hope the country will pick up some strategic investment around EV, electronic vehicles,
01:47 which have now shifted to a lot of Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, more so in Vietnam.
01:54 And even Indonesia is picking up some very interesting investment to build EV vehicles in their countries.
02:03 But here in the Philippines, I was talking to another group yesterday.
02:07 They were telling me that more Filipinos would rather have a hybrid setup,
02:13 work from home for a few days during the work week and then the other two or three days in their offices.
02:21 Is this the kind of setup that we're looking now for the future of work?
02:26 Yes, that has been like the burning issue late of last year
02:31 and continue to be the single most critical issue faced by the chief people officer,
02:37 the HR leader of the organization in trying to create a balance, what I call, work space.
02:43 Today, people talk about space, right?
02:46 Safe space and work space, right?
02:49 I think the need today tends to drive more people back to the office,
02:56 but the need of work-life balance and then more critically,
03:02 the home affair that you now get so used to manage during the pandemic is such a powerful pull.
03:10 And then of course, you have a lot of opportunity around about remote work opportunity,
03:16 offshore remote work as well.
03:19 So that brought the people into like an imbalanced situation.
03:25 People are still drawn and become establishing the work from home as a key criteria in making a career decision.
03:33 Because I talked to also a lot of people, they work here in the Philippines, but earn in dollars.
03:38 Correct.
03:39 Right? They have expat salaries.
03:40 Correct.
03:41 So now we live in a borderless workplace where you can work from your home country,
03:48 but still do a lot of international work.
03:51 Are those kinds of job offerings available in many sectors right now?
03:56 It cut across a lot of sectors, of course, from customer service,
04:02 more so in the technology space from application development to graphic designer
04:08 to even what they call, I would say, SEM, e-commerce.
04:18 And then it now expand into secretarial work.
04:22 A number of major companies have put up what they call virtual assistant company.
04:27 I've seen a couple of them running up to like a few thousand employees.
04:31 So they can actually act as your remote executive assistant here servicing people from US, Europe, and even in Singapore.
04:40 What about for Vivente's Search Asia in 2023?
04:45 Where were you able to put a lot of Filipinos at work? In which industries?
04:51 We covered almost the entire market.
04:54 So we were able to put a lot of people back to job in the call center industry, retail, real estate and construction,
05:03 and of course, hospitality as well.
05:05 So those are the four industry winners that we have for 2023.
05:10 And it's basically across the board from entry level to management levels to C-suiters.
05:16 Yes, that's right.
05:18 But on the flip side, you mentioned even though there are jobs being created,
05:23 there are also Filipinos who are leaving for overseas.
05:27 So it's a zero-sum game, almost a zero-sum game.
05:30 So where are you placing Filipinos overseas and where are they wanted right now?
05:35 We hardly do overseas employment. Our core business has been fully focused on enabled careers in the country.
05:43 But we see a lot of movement right now.
05:45 Now Middle East is almost going beyond attracting,
05:49 they're almost extracting talent in the hospitality and retail, including construction.
05:57 Because wherever you travel overseas in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia,
06:01 I mean, there are just Filipinos everywhere in retail, hospitality, and even in technology and in shipping.
06:09 But what about fears of artificial intelligence, are you meaning taking over jobs in the workplace?
06:18 Well, the fear really is very valid and reasonable.
06:23 But I think the master in this new destiny, new journey will be people, us as well, right?
06:34 How are we going to control the use of technology?
06:37 One of the most highly-flavoured, demanded jobs today is prompt engineers.
06:42 And prompt engineers is actually not even a computer scientist,
06:45 but more coming from the humanities program that teach large language model,
06:52 and expert system to learn.
06:55 And the demand is growing so fast in that area.
06:58 So I can see a new set of jobs coming in, the architect, the AI architect,
07:04 the builder of architect solution, and then the managers of the new architect, new AI solutions.
07:14 So I can see a new industry being formed.
07:17 And countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Singapore have come up with a blueprint
07:22 to enable them to go into AI and trying to win the AI market.
07:27 Malaysia just form up a digital ministry to attract investment in automation and more so in AI.
07:35 And of course, the Philippine government also has to look at new policies to be able to embrace artificial intelligence
07:44 and to reskill and upskill more Filipinos for these high-tech jobs.
07:48 That's correct.
07:49 Thank you so much for joining us on the final word.
07:53 Yu Ming Chin, the founder of Viventis Search Asia.
07:57 Thank you so much.
07:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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