Difficult Job Search for Media Graduates During the Pandemic

Ms Leung shares her experience of trying to find employment opportunities after Circuit Breaker last year.

Ms Hoi Cheng Leung, 24, and her friends shared job postings with one another and helped to vet each other’s works during their job search. Credit(left): Hoi Cheng Leung. Credit(right): StockSnap from Pixabay.

Due to the uncertainties of the pandemic, a company had to revert their decision of signing a contract with Miss Leung Hoi Cheng.

Miss Leung majored in Communications and New Media (CNM) in the National University of Singapore (NUS) and graduated in June 2020. She and her friends felt pessimistic when they realized they would be graduating during the pandemic. However, those thoughts rationalized as she realized that everyone else was also going through this pandemic, just that they were facing different challenges. She knew that she had to accept and adapt to her current situation.

In the Graduate Employment Survey released by the Ministry of Education last year, it was found that graduates from the Arts, Design, and Media course cluster faced an increase of 5.0% in employment rate from 2019 to 2020, but a decrease of 12.3% in permanent full-time employment rate during the same period of time.

Miss Leung is one of the graduates who were able to secure a permanent full-time position as a UX Designer at a tech consultancy startup. Before landing this job, she and her friends often shared job postings with one another and vetted each other’s portfolios and writings. In the end, Miss Leung was offered a full-time position after working with her current company for part-time and freelance work in the past.

Mr Alexander Mitchell, 51, is an assistant professor at NUS’ Department of CNM. He was especially concerned about his students’ job search. He invited industry guest speakers in his online classes to assist his students in building connections within the industry and had meetings with government agencies to strategise how they could better help graduating students.

When asked about the difficulties he faced while preparing for his students’ graduation last year, he said, “the main challenge was staying adaptable and quickly finding ways to help.” At that point in time, the circuit breaker had started and it was unclear if the situation would get better or worse.

Aside from taking on full-time positions, there were students who became self-employed. Ms Leung said that “there were a lot of home businesses during this period of time,” since there was likely more social media traffic due to the pandemic. Many students also did freelance or part-time work during their studies and likely continued doing so after graduation.

As someone who landed a job with a company that she used to freelance for, Ms Leung advises graduating students to “put yourself out there in order to gain visibility as anyone you meet can be a potential connection to your future employment.”