IT’S refreshing to just listen sometimes, especially when the one talking is talking from experience that is founded on success. In short, not “satsat”.
I would have just loved to listen, except that polite company dictates that you also respond and contribute, even if all you do is grunt, and so grunted and nodded and put in my tiny pieces I did, just to make it appear that I was conversing.
The persons are a chief executive officer of a group of companies and his wife who focuses on the human resources side of things, who managed to create a whole ecosystem of work and job satisfaction: that’s William “Wally” U. Liu Jr. of the Primary Group of Builders Cebu-based conglomerate composed of Primary Structures, Primary Homes, Primary Properties, Concrete Solu, SKILLS, Primary Skills, and just very recently, the Maayo Hotel and Wellness, and his wife Paulette.
From one real estate development company, it is now a conglomerate that is a whole ecosystem of personal growth and career paths and development peppered with a strong corporate social responsibility that creates skilled workers from out of school youths, battered and disadvantage women, and the hearing impaired.
While they were running a profitable real estate development company, they were literally scraping the bottom of the skilled manpower pool and getting them for very high rates, simply because the good ones are all abroad and there is no one left but these expensive but not so skilled ones.
The solution: train women. Yes. When you have been in the industry for some time, you do tend to see the advantage of training women, make them battered women to start with, and you have a powerhouse of grim, determined, and desperate souls wanting to take control of their lives.
That’s their School of Knowledge for Industrial Labor, Leadership, and Service Foundation, a tech-voc training center accredited by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda), and just two years ago, they piloted a full-fledged senior high school offering the Home Economics which has Housekeeping, Domestic Work, Hilot and Food & Beverage, and they also offer Carpentry, Masonry and Tile Setting under Industrial Arts.
“The service you experience here (Maayo Hotel) is the product of our schools. We right-train people from K-12,” Wally said. “When you go to school when you go to a university you are not trained for the industry eh, so when you get to the workplace you have to redo everything again, so here, it’s really academe industry.”
For her part, Paulette said they have lady masons, lady carpenters, and their first lady heavy equipment operator became a Tesda awardee.
“That first lady heavy equipment operator is now a project specialist. She’s now a supervisor and she’s managing men. Our empowering women program is very strong,” she said.
Here’s more, all the students in their tech-voc and senior high are scholars, all 6,000 of them. Their first batch of senior high graduates not only received their senior high diplomas and Tesda certificates, they also received certificates of job offers from the various companies under the Primary Group. How cool is that?
What we were seeing were people who found solutions to situations instead of focusing on a problem.
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” so goes a Chinese proverb. But maybe that’s too old school for them. And so, they not just taught men to fish, once the men or women have become adept at fishing, they offer them the pond from which to fish.
The hearing impaired, Pochet said, are working in their restaurants.
Now, who would have imagined that all these came from scraping the bottom of the manpower pool?
As we ask these, we hear the nagging voice of our wise elders as they put us down a peg or two after they catch us in despair: “And problema sinosolusyonan, hindi pinoproblema (Problems are there to be solved not to make us problematic).”
(saestremera@gmail.com)