Story of Change: Sok Sarem (Director of Job Centre in Kompong Cham Province)

Sarem is currently a head of the Job Centre in Kompong Cham (KPC) province. His main duties in the Job Center are matching job seekers with prospective companies, registering job seekers, organizing workshops for students and the local authority to promote the National Employment Agency work and available job opportunities to local people. He also prepares training for local university students, equipping them with necessary skills and preparation prior to employment.

“For my daily work, external communication with the local authority has been difficult, and devising an effective communication strategy is challenging”, Sarem raised. However, through the communication strategy training provided by experts from BBC Media Action, there is better connection with job seekers, employers, and local authority. NEA now places a social media platform as the main means of communication with job seekers and local authority. To communicate well with the local authority, after the training courses for instance, NEA started using Telegram and can ask the local authority to help share information. Currently, there are more staff to manage KPC Job Centre Facebook page to respond to increasing request and questions from job seekers, especially 12-grade students. In responding to the target audience, NEA started making key messages easier to understand and remembered to promote them to job seekers and their family effectively. Messages are written in simple, straight and concise words with key points such as salary range, contact number and free service. NEA now tries to adapt messages to different people like low-skilled job seekers, education job seekers and employers. “More job seekers approach Job Center now, and there is increasing number of registrations, daily inquiries and call-in rate”, Sarem added.

He also pointed out that many young people do not prioritize local jobs but tend to migrate to work abroad. Most of them did not do cost and benefit calculation of migration risks and challenges they might face along the way. Thus, using safe migration knowledge from the dream to goal workshop, he aims to guide job seekers to look for local jobs first before migrating abroad, consider job risks, family safety and job abuses.

“Effective Communication Strategy is really important for National Employment Agency because a lot of work at the NEA and Job Centre requires external communication with different people from different background such as employers, job seekers and unskilled people. Before, we needed to go directly to announce our information, now we can send the information to the local authority to help share the opportunity to the local community”, Sarem quoted.

Story of Change produced by: BBC Media Action