Job seekers should try the "Blue Ocean" strategy

There is a powerful idea today that can change the fate of our millions of young job seekers who are hopelessly fighting for low-paying jobs with substandard wages and salaries and poor working conditions. This is an idea created some six years ago in the Harvard Business School, written into a book by an Asian and an American and has sold more than one million copies within the same year it was published by Harvard in 2005.

I came across this powerful book while working as a diplomat in three of our embassies abroad, taking care of our OFWs. And currently, as an Executive Director of the National Maritime Polytechnic, it dawns on me that this BLUE OCEAN STRATEGYcan really be an instrument of renewal, of changing the paradigms of our job applicants here and abroad.

While the concept is intended for businessmen, entrepreneurs and industrialists, the whole idea can be reconfigured and used by workers competing in the labor market. Simply put, the author says that the markets can be classified into the Red Ocean and the Blue Ocean. The Red segment of the labor market is where the majority of the average workers fight tooth and nail to capture a small space in a very narrow, hotly contested, unpleasant territory. 

The Red Ocean is the usual arena of the unskilled and the low-skilled, highly educated but poorly trained for the world of work. This is the narrow terrain, often used by young and naive graduates and undergraduates where they engage in cut-throat competitions for dirty, dangerous, difficult, degrading and deceptive jobs. This where they will first experience the career trauma for which they were never prepared for in the classroom.

The Blue Ocean is the new paradise where the usual colegiala and campus idols fear to tread. For this is where exciting jobs, whichdemand a high entrepreneurial spirit, human relations and communicationsas well asproblem-solving skills, well-developed planning and strategizing competencies, could be found. This is the territory that needs young and dynamic talents with high tolerance for ambiguity, young people who would not mind small basic salary with unlimited potentials for performance-based variable benefits and other rewards. This is the territory that does not glorify security of tenure for the non-performers, but promises unlimited areas for growth to the high performers.

The Red Ocean is sick and tired with an oversupply of nursing graduates pleading to be hired as call center agents, or flight attendants, or law graduates who swallow their sense of pride, and in their moments of desperation, end up applying to become hotel clerks and factory administrative assistants. The Red Ocean is suffocated with too many education graduates who could not pass the Board exams and aspire to become teachers’ aide in Montessori pre-schools and village nurseries. We have many teachers wanting to works as DHs in HongKong and Singapore or engineering graduates working as factory workers in Korea and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the Blue Ocean is hungry for graduates, and even undergrads who want to venture on sales, or as management trainees, who want to be trained as entrepreneurs and as innovators, quality managers and trainers of people, young people who have high emotional, not just intelligence quotients, who have a good balance between the left and right brain, who are not afraid of problems but are stimulated by the challenge of problem-solving and reconciling people in conflict situations.

The labor markets do not want summa cum laudes or magna cum laudes who are nerds and cannot relate with average people. The markets hunger for pragmatic, practical and street smart individuals who are team players and are naturally savvy in the complicated world of human interactions, where customers aretoo demanding and consumers are often angry and suspicious. The employers out there are eagerly waiting for job applicants who can balance profit with people, who can coordinate with government functionaries and NGOs and make the company look good.

The Blue Ocean is wide out there and there are too few takers. If our young job seekers want to make it in the real world, they should learn from the masters and start to navigate away from the Red Ocean and go to where the real challenge is. They never teach this in the classroom but this is the new wisdom. Let us tell our youngsters to change their paradigm if they want to win in the global labor markets here and anywhere in the world.