More than 3,200 people throng job fair for jobs within North East CDC

More than 3200 people made a beeline for 400 job vacancies in the North East Community Development Council (CDC) on Saturday.

Positions available ranged from sales assistants and logistic officers to executives and supervisors, paying between S$800 to S$2500 a month.

The jobs were offered by tenants of Singapore's newest suburban mall that is opening in Tampines next month.

Amore Fitness wanted to fill 20 positions, ranging from front desk officers, gym instructors to personal trainers, offering a salary of at least S$1000 a month.

For the two front desk officer positions alone, there were 70 applicants.

Amore said training would be given to the successful applicants.

Human resource executive at Amore Fitness, Yap Hui Mei, said: "Depending on the position itself… sales, for example, we need someone with sales experience. For applicants without any training, let's say they are applying (for a job in the) spa (sector), we actually tie up with Spa Institute and they can go for training."

MP for Tampines GRC, Masagoes Zulkifli, said that training and retraining is the way to go.

But he stressed that job seekers should moderate their expectations when looking for a job.

Mr Masagos said: "You have to start upgrading yourself. SPUR and all sorts of programmes are available for you to go for if you want to change jobs."

Mr Masagos said he had been seeing more jobless professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs) at the meet-the-people sessions.

He added that these people could consider the many positions that need to be filled in the public sector such as in the Home Affairs and Education Ministries.

Mr Masagos said: “I hardly saw PMETs looking for jobs in my meet-the-people sessions. They usually came for issues such as leakages in their houses. But now… (the number is) more than what I've seen before. But I'm happy to say that we have an agency which is the CDC… to ensure that there are some job matching and skills upgrading programmes that they can go for.”

Many job seekers Channel NewsAsia spoke to seem to heed the advice on job expectations.

One said: "Any job they offer me, as long as (they don’t mind) my age, I can take (up the job)."

The job fair was organised under the North East Job Radar programme which aimed to highlight jobs available within the North East CDC.

But the CDC itself also holds regular job recruitment exercises, offering jobs that are available islandwide.

At the end of the job fair, more than 4700 applications were received.

- Channel News Asia