By Lee Khai Yan

FOR the past few months, while my fellow final-year students in university fretted and sweated about landing an ideal job upon graduation, I was investigating the same issue among another age group: the elderly.

Along with my group-mates, I followed a 61-year old man, Mr Shon Lee, in his search for a job.

The research was all part of my final-year project to produce a video documentary exploring the employment situation for the elderly here.

To get a variety of voices, we knocked on about 50 doors in the Lavender Street area to survey and interview the elderly about their job-searching expectations.

The results were surprising.

While everyone - including my parents, teachers and the Government - has been lecturing me and my peers, advising us to be adaptable and realistic about the available jobs, apparently that same lecture has not been addressed to the elderly.

Most of them were inflexible about the kind of jobs they wanted to do.

In the process of speaking with them, I found that they wanted the safety of a permanent job and were reluctant to take on contract positions. They wanted to work in familiar settings, instead of looking at areas which required them to learn new skills.

Take Shon for example.

Retrenched during the 2003 Sars period, he has been looking for a job for the past five years.

At every job interview we went to, he repeatedly said that he did not wish to take up shift work.

Curious, I asked him why. He said: 'Shift work I do not want, because I have to rotate hours. Somewhere out there, there are office-hour jobs.'

So what really struck me about the survey was that young or old, we are all choosy by nature, always holding out for something better.

To some extent - as a job seeker myself - I identify with Shon, though our concerns differ.

While I am eager to upgrade myself to be more 'marketable', while I will not hesitate to do shift work as long as I like the job, Shon is the exact opposite.

And while Shon is willing to settle for a job he does not enjoy, as long as he gets regular working hours, I will not choose a job I have no passion for.

Still, maybe it is okay to try out something different once in a while.

Young or old, we should be more open to accepting jobs we never considered before.

Who knows, we might actually grow to like it.

And, yes, I have been trying to convince myself of the same thing.

The writer, 22, is a fourth-year student at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on February 09, 2009.