This economic principle seem to prevail at every corner of our lives.

I found myself wrestling with these thoughts even as I sought to find a biblical framework to make sense of it all. For example, we want a good job, but the labour market is horrible. Should we then trust God and wait until we get a good one or should we lower our expectations and take what is offered to us? In Singapore’s context, the labour market is not good at all. A huge portion of manufacturing related jobs are shifted overseas because Singapore’s labour cost is just way too high. This is in spite of the fact that many companies site their Asian headquarters in Singapore. They simply just shift the manufacturing portion outside! (Really bad news for us engineers) So the labour market is irreversibly restructured. To add to this, look at the rising number of tertiary students and business graduates. With such a big supply of paper qualifications, supply and demand sets in to eliminate the value of paper. What counts in the future, is experience and top notch paper qualifications. Period.

Function
Sometimes, I can’t help but look at my peers in law and medcine. For these people, they are shielded from the market forces and could command a premium in their pay. Why should they, when we attend the same universities? How did these professions managed to do it? Surely, the top hierarchies of people in these professions are perpetuating this? Are lawyers more capable and smarter than engineers? Also, by tradition, most CEOs are either from Sales & Marketing or Finance. Have you ever heard of a CEO from Operations or Human Resource? With our government’s recent drive for the biomedical industry, we have a huge influx of interest in PhD work. Will our scholars and aspirants in the universities come back and become researchers? How many of them are really interested in Science purely? How many will end up in business development, intellectual property and project management once they graduate? I think knowing the Singapore psyche, the later is much more probable. If we use carrots to motivate, then we get rabbits rite?

Firm
There are firms which have reached a certain level of brand equity, that makes it prohibitive for a new graduate to enter. 2 good examples are SAP and Dell. Just check to see if they take in new entrants. Because of the market power they command, they find it easy to recruit the best people from other companies. Why train the young people when they will leave once they have learned the ropes and acquired marketability?

Industry
How about people in the oil industry? These guys make tonnes of money because oil is a limited supply and sky high demand item. They get obscene bonuses, rocket pay and stay on their jobs for ages and ages. Just look at the employee turn over in the electronics industry! Another charming industry is finance. Everyone wants to go where the money is and I guess finance deals directly with money. I have engineer friends who are branching into finance all over the place man..sigh

Country
Lets have a show of hands, how many of us wanna migrate to Australia? Haha…I went there to work once and was sorely tempted (just kidding). 20 Million people in such a huge swarthe of land?!! Gosh, just imagine the resources available. Surely supply and demand works to our advantage! If you hear about the labour laws there, you will be very perplexed why you are still toiling away in the rest of Asia. Minus the racial discrimination, I think this is a very idyllic place to live in

Singapore faces a tough fight by virtue of its geopolitics. Alot of the policies that our government engenders are towards economic survival. So much so that in order for us to stay ahead of the pack, we become a very pragmatic people; much unlike our western counterparts who can pursue education for the sake of passion without being concerned about the future career prospects. These students simply take gap years! They would just take one year off to travel and get involved in non-economic activities. Just look at Singaporeans and Malaysians? Is this something we feel as value adding? No! The guys would feel that after 2 years of NS, it is time to chase the American dream. We are already 2 years behind the ladies, taking another gap year will leave us irrevocably behind!

To survive and to survive excellently, we need to regionalise! And thats how our jobs have to be in order to remain marketable - to reach international shores. Singapore cannot afford to stay within our shores. We have nothing intrinsic except our people. China and India are good places to start because of the high growth potential and huge markets.

So when choosing a job, one should look into

1. Function
2. Firm
3. Industry
4. Country

Are these the most important criteria? I guess they can be, but they are also informal factors such as whether your boss likes you and grooms you, the culture of your company, the colleagues you work with, the developmental potential of your job - whether you can rise in the ladder and expand in your work scope, growth potential of your company, the working hours and so on.

Finally, for all the things I have said above, they are not the most important ones. They are merely factors of consideration in the secular world. If all these things are the driving force in my decision making, then surely, I miss the essense of living. I am first and foremost a spiritual being, then an economic one. But these are shown so that we don’t overspiritualise things or give simplistic answers in our decision making process. Rather, squaring off with what we see in the world, we struggle in our inner being to apprehend the wisest choice.