Sri Lanka Youth – you have never had so many opportunities!

You are still drinking your mother’s milk

I have had a good life with many opportunities grow up in different environments and live and work in many countries, and are able to evaluate them in my older years and give of my experiences and knowledge to our youth, so that they may not have to go through the same hurdles, but hopefully go beyond grabbing the opportunities now available to improve the quality of their lives from here on.

We never had the variety of opportunities now available to youth as they live in an age where their parents have been able to provide a lot more for them, than we were fortunate enough to have, though in our time we were the fortunate ones bearing in mind the technology of the time.

In this age of cheap broadband, smartphones, Facebook and twitter, the opportunities for interaction are far greater and one is privy to the latest information, in ways we could only dream about in our youth. Why is it then that you are NOT taking full advantage of all these great benefits to make your lives so much easier.

I may not be incorrect in saying that today’s youth are uneducated, unable to find happiness, are truly worried about their future, and due to the two children households have bonds with their parents of dependency that we did not have. Whilst they like to believe their independence from parents, going to tuition classes in busses, with new associations and love interests, they are still literally drinking mother’s milk, incapable of doing anything at home to help their parents, and make themselves useful at home. This makes them completely ill prepared for life on their own, and in my experience youth marriages are fraught with problems, not just economic as they don’t know how to manage on a salary, but basically they don’t even know how to wash clothes, or how to cook food, when they don’t even have to get firewood for the hearth which their parents had to find.

In this era of Food City shopping even for the Middle classes, the convenience of life with gas Cylinders, and Fridges don’t seem to have given the independence of living, independently.

Eating out is the norm, now, whilst it was very rare in our youth, but despite these conveniences, young people spend longer at home, and once married are less inclined to live independently of their parents. Of course I am talking about Sri Lanka here, as there may be other influences at work overseas that are different.

So why is it with so many more opportunities of income, our youth are simply frozen in fright as to find their way on their own in this world. I get mothers come to be with their 30 year old sons, who have never left home, pleading with me to find them some employment. Have they not been weaned out of their home environment, and made to be independent and not rely on their parents to find them a job?

I cannot figure this out, as media advertise vacancies, like never before. In our day, no vacancies were advertised! There are so many avenues of education to whatever field that that one wants to pursue. Why is it that most of our youth especially the Sinhala speaking ones,  NOT know what is available out there for them.

It is tragic with so many vacancies they are intent on getting jobs that are NOT available. When I direct them in what is available, they somehow think I can do some magic in to find the job they are looking for.

Employers are crying out at the quality of people who come to be interviewed, who just are unable to even carry on an intelligent conversation at an interview which fails them in the first minute. They cannot write a CV or realize the importance of an error free, CV as that is the first point of contact with the potential employer before being called for an interview.

How is it that people just send CVs to companies without even a covering letter requesting an interview to convince the Company that he or she could be an invaluable employee for that company?

When I give my basic hours training about all the opportunities available the potential applicant is open mouthed, with incredulity on what is said, as if they are either tongue tied, or heard the facts of life for the first time. How can these people ever find work? Unless of course the employers are willing to take these Montessori kids and take them through the realities of life, hoping they can quickly assimilate and embrace the new environment without delay.

The Govt, and University system is still in a state of limbo, only talking about the problem rather than offering a practical solution. There is NO TIME to faff around this problem, and we need to quickly get our youth who have left school prepared for the world out there. When I see people in their 30s still trying to find their calling due to the lack of this basic induction of the realities of life, I wonder how we as a society, has been able to let our Education system slide to such a new low, making them completely ill prepared for the wonderful world of opportunity that they have missed.