Mental Wranglings

Wednesday January 16, 2008

I spoke with my potential employees in Jamaica on Monday and ended up feeling really disappointed and angry. The salary offered was the same that someone I know who is working in the telemarketing business makes as a supervisor. She has very limited experience and three or four CXCs. I have a Master’s degree and over 10 years experience in various business fields. I wasn’t really angry about the salary itself just that there seems to be no effort to compensate people for the time and effort put into qualifying themselves to be high productivity employees. The question arose – How can Jamaica expect to attract the best and brightest minds in a competitive market with high labor mobility? The answer - they can’t and that is why the country continues to be in this mess.

I recently read a series of letter to the Gleaner and Jamaica Observer from young people who had gone to the US to study and in the interest of serving their country and being back home have been seeking jobs in Jamaica. Long and short of it is that they have met with no success and the compensation is just not competitive. These young people, like me, are torn between service to their country and family and their own personal success. It’s a dilemma many young Jamaicans like myself face.

Even more interesting in this tale, was the behavior of the Human Resources Manager. She was so negative about me returning to Jamaica and even cautioned me that the small salary offered was nothing compared to what I could earn elsewhere, even in the private sector, and that it would be insufficient to live on unless I was going to live my parents and didn’t have the expense of rent and utilities. I haven’t lived with parents or roommates for six years, and that really isn’t a viable option anyway. Aye, dios mios! I thought HRs job was to sell you the job as something you would want to do, but nothing really works the way it should in Jamaica anyway. Nonetheless, I can appreciate her honesty and what I guess were her attempts at full disclosure in order to ensure that I make the right decision for me and the organization.

I went on to spend the rest of the week wrangling and going over the pros and cons of my choices – Japan vs Jamaica - with this in mind. I finally had enough today and decided to put this out of mind till next Monday. Not even five minutes later my Mom calls to ask how I was doing with these wranglings. It was prophetic, I believe, that my wisest adviser and the person who knows me best would call at this precise moment. A sign you think? Anyways at the end of this conversation, I feel really assured that I have a good support system and as usual realized that I let these kinds of things stress me out too much. As she said, “Don’t worry. Go for what you want and it will work out.”

So that is what I will really (try to) do. I’ll keep you posted.