The machines are taking over

The job market is now a competitive and unforgiving place and often times finding a job is harder than counting all the stripes on a zebra. A quick and easy step is to dissect the education budget tabled by the minister is to gauge the direction in which the economy is being taken by the government. Discovering nascent job markets before their explosion can be helpful for both job-seekers and job-givers. Take the finance and marketing sectors as examples. There has been an explosion of marketing majors pouring into the market looking for jobs fueled by the demands of recently made corporate houses. Where do you train your sights this time around? More of the same? Perhaps not, if you are to study the budget for fiscal year 2014-15 carefully.

The unique thing in this budget is that education and information technology were appropriated under the same bracket. And in his speech during the budget, Muhith talked of his wish to implement ICT courses in schools from a very early age. This is the biggest suggestion that the government wishes Bangladesh's burgeoning job market to shift focus from tertiary jobs into the e-tertiary sector which now constitutes a rather large part of the world's job force. These two sectors combined were given Tk. 12,598 million in this year's budget. The allocation for education, in fact, has decreased in percentage from previous years with the government keen on providing vocational and technical education to enhance skill-sets rather than learning.
So, given the current trajectory the government is taking, what is the cardinal sin you as a job-seeker can commit? Being technologically handicapped. The prospects of finding a job appears to be bleak for people like yours truly who have difficulty in forwarding e-mails. And while I am set to be marginalized and removed from what is going to end up being the biggest job market in the country, you can do it differently. Start by taking basic IT courses and just dabble around with a computer until someone takes pity on you and gives you a job. For the rest of us, we wait in the hope that perhaps the IT job-market will stretch to include jobs where you only need to share and like things on Facebook. Wait a minute. It already does. And I can't do that properly, either.