Nistha Rayamajhi

Due to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in the West, Sandesh Pradhan, 24, was made redundant by his company in London, as he lacked experience and was not under stronger visa category.

Due to the economic crisis, it was getting more difficult to find a decent job. So eventually he decided to come home.

Rather than wasting his career by doing odd part-time jobs, he returned to Nepal in order to gain experience and pursue a meaningful job relevant to his studies.Every year, there are many students from Nepal going abroad for higher studies. People have a notion that those who have gone abroad are gone forever. But there are many like Pradhan who have taken the risk of coming back with expectations of getting hold of an appropriate job.But Pradhan’s hope was all gone to vain. He explains that since he had studied computer science, he was hoping to find software programming jobs.

“But since the software market in the country isn’t as mature as abroad, I was forced to seek out jobs in other fields,” he says.In due course, he ended up in a sales team in an IT company. It was then he realized that getting jobs here depends more on luck and recommendations rather than ability and qualifications that one has.

“Technically I feel that I’m still under-qualified to do this job. But having studied abroad where I got the opportunity to interact with people of diverse backgrounds, I got the right skills that suit well for my current job,” he says.He adds that when in terms of professional practice and paper works, he feels that his qualifications even surpass his current job role. Forced to switch careers due to lack of finding a decent job is one of the issues of those who come back and there are even instances where students are left jobless though they have good degrees in hand.

There are many other returnees whose anguish seems to be similar as that of Pradhan’s.
After completing his undergraduate studies in Business studies from the US, Prashant Thapa, 25, decided to come back to the country to get relevant experience in his field. He wanted to settle in Nepal in the long term; so he came back to get experience relevant to the context of the country, build domestic network, understand the condition here, and also to get the inside knowledge of working in Nepal. Since banks are booming in the country, he wanted to try his hands in the banking sector so that he could also hone his skills. But to his dismay, he realized that those who have only completed their undergraduate degrees are not given much responsibility, as the issue of distrust creeps in.

He further adds that since banks function in a structured way and there is hardly any flexibility when it comes to work, there is little room to practice what they have learnt abroad. 

Moreover, the banks would rather want to invest in people who would stay back, as they assume that undergraduate students are soon likely to leave for their grad school and are here only temporarily.

“They also give more priority and promotion to those who have Master’s degrees. People fail to see the potential that one has and that is the main difference that I found here, as compared to abroad,” he laments. Another returnee, Kritika Shrestha, 26, who completed her degree in communications from the US, has lost all hope and is thinking of going back to the land of opportunities.

She explains that initially she worked for a startup company as a marketing head. “I used all my experiences for the good of the company but they fired me without any notice.”She says that the working culture in the country still lacks professionalism. Wornout due to waiting for a positive response from the places that she had applied for jobs, Shrestha adds, “It’s really exasperating and demeaning to be unemployed even though you have a good degree.”

She also complains that nepotism is prevalent in the country which is acting as a hindrance to those who are competent and don’t have anyone to recommend them to a particular workplace.Even Santosh Ghimire, 24, shares almost the same situation like Shrestha’s. Though it has been almost a year since he came back, he has been without a job.

“Do we lack opportunities so much so that we’re left with the only option of going back to foreign countries again?” he questions.According to the report “Report on the Nepal Labor Force Survey” published by the Department of Statistics, Nepal in 2008, a large number of young people are semi-unemployed and unemployed. In Nepal, more than 2 million youth are unemployed, according to studies: Nearly 49.9 percent urban and 32.2 percent rural youth.

In 2009, over 2 million, 52 thousand and 8 hundred youth above the age of 15 are out of jobs which is 42 percentage more than the previous year.Sandesh Pradhan thinks that companies hiring people often feel that formal methods like writing reports, analyses, charting and research are just to meet some criteria and nobody takes them seriously.He says that professional people just carry on doing whatever they have been doing since a long time or in whatever way they are more comfortable with, rather than what is efficient and good for a greater number of people.

In a place where we still lack skilled manpower, such returnees are a boon as they bring along innovative expertise that will undeniably benefit the places that hire them. But is nepotism and conventional way of working rules the workplace here so much so that they fail to see what such people have to offer to the sectors concerned?

Pradhan adds that employers need to be more flexible and try to incorporate newer ideas and skills that the students who have studied abroad bring along with them.“I wish the companies that recruit people who come back from abroad with experiences appreciate them and give them an opportunity to apply those skills, rather than view them as obstruction to their daily business,” he adds.

Published on: 11 October 2011 | Republica