How do you offer a handshake over a Zoom interview? In all the mandatory workplace modules I took at university — all with cheery titles like “Career Power Up!” or “Absolute Basics for the Office” — none could have prepared me for graduating into a pandemic. Neither the students nor the faculty, I am sure, could have expected a global disruption of the scale we have seen over the past year.
So, while the interviewing tips were well-meaning and helpful (“Offer a firm handshake”; “Maintain eye contact”; and “Say you’re passionate and driven, and try to believe it”), they all but went out of the window when the “circuit breaker” rolled around.
What did remain, however, was looming unemployment. With our final semester unceremoniously cut short, the Class of 2020 went out in search of job opportunities, armed only with dated interview etiquette and virtual proof of a degree that would not be conferred in person until months later.
Perhaps the first job out of school is romanticised through the lens of Hollywood, embodied by the wide-eyed eagerness of Robert De Niro in The Intern, or Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada.
Like Hathaway’s character, my joining The Edge Singapore started glamorously enough. At the end of my first week, I was despatched to the wet berths of Sentosa Cove, where I spoke to Finian Tan of Vickers Venture Partners onboard his personal yacht. It was a sizeable craft, one that smoothened the waves lapping at the manicured coast, and perhaps the only tremors I felt were those stemming from my nerves.
See: Be fearless, change the world, says Vickers' Tan
For the most part of the year, however, I wrote and interviewed from the confines of my own desk at home. After the circuit breaker delayed renovation works at a new home, for one arduous fortnight, I even performed the tasks on bare floors. My lower back did not appreciate the dedication, but the newsmakers I spoke to thankfully excused the suspicious echoes in my video calls.
At the end of 2020, our editorial team set out to interview people from various sectors. From transport to F&B, healthcare to hospitality, all business owners expressed shock at how quickly their fortunes had changed in a year. In the eight months since, little has changed for those in retail and dining, who are still stuck in a rut.
The first quarter of 2021 was perhaps our closest brush with the “new normal”, an optimistic ideal that, so far, has only truly existed on paper. In those months, I rode swanky elevators to the highest floors of the shiny Grade-A offices in the CBD and spoke to founders, brokers and fund managers — in person — while scaling the steep incline that is business journalism.
That respite did not last long, however, and hopes for a triumphant victory over Covid-19 by National Day were abruptly cut short in July. Offices the island over may have the luxury of safe-distancing, but we are only as strong as our most-overlooked sectors.
‘Covid-19 cohorts’
Here, at the one-year mark of our careers and at the height of a new Covid-19 cluster, the Class of 2020 is back where we started. A tiny bit wiser, dare I say, but just as frazzled as the rest of the office folk.
For the two “Covid-19 cohorts” that have entered the workforce since, the work-from-home experience is all we know of the corporate world so far.
See also: Man proposes, Covid-19 disposes
From this comes a twisted sense of camaraderie, that for every mention of the word “unprecedented”, we are comforted by an understanding that everyone, even the most senior of staff, is feeling equally lost.
As vaccination rates rise and the pandemic becomes less of a concern, consider the generations to come. Compared to them, we may be the lucky ones.
When we return to the office, whenever that may be, consider bolstering support for the coming crops of graduates, who will have endured an undergraduate experience vastly different from what was advertised or imagined. After semesters of hybrid classes, they may be more productive working remotely, or with flexible hours.
Consider also the fresh faces in the coming decade, who are now still in their teenage schooling years, learning and living in an environment most different from what we experienced. They may consume information differently, and technology could play a larger role in fostering social bonds among those in their generation.
See also: 8 in 10 Singapore employees prefer to work from home, but are employers equally keen?
For years, governments, engineers and human resource departments have talked about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and how the office can prepare for a blurring of the physical and the digital. Covid-19 has brought these drastic changes to the fore, and all in the span of a year.
We may have no playbook on how to deal with a crisis like Covid-19, but neither does anyone else. From here on, the future of work is in uncharted waters.
Still, with only two months trimmed from our degree programmes and some fretting over virtual job interviews, I think the Class of 2020 is, indeed, fortunate to witness these changes.
And we look forward to offering handshakes in person.
Photo: Bloomberg
