Wednesday 9 July 2008

Ugandan doctors in UK unemployed

New Vision (Kampala)
Sunday, 6 July, 2008
Joshua Masinde
Many Ugandan and Nigerian doctors in the United Kingdom and India are unemployed despite being qualified and the numerous job opportunities there.
Dr. Ceppie Merry, the head of Clinical Pharmacology Department at Mulago Medical School, said this was because they do not know how to answer interview questions and write curriculum vitae (CVs).
“You get a job by knowing how to present yourself and how to answer interview questions, besides your qualifications,” she said.
Most doctors, she added, are not updated about the job market overseas.
Ceppie, who also teaches at Trinity College in Dublin, was addressing medical students on career management at Mulago Medical School on Friday.
She said the advances in technology have also led to the fear that many doctors would be unemployed in 10 years.
“Tele-medicine will be available in every village. This might render many doctors jobless,” Ceppie pointed out. She advised the medics to stay up-to-date and look for opportunities in the health and medical world.

2 comments:

tiny said...

Good for those Ugandan, and Nigerian doctors.
You see, I believe it is our generation to revive our continent.
Our diet is enriched by television and radio, plus the glossy magazines from the ideological West.
This way, we see and hear what is admirable from the West.
If we could emulate the Japanese after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour, we would be ahead in terms of human development. And hence would see no reason to try jobbing in the West.
Those doctors surely filled in some application forms at the British High Commission premises in their respective countries.
Apart from the context of the questions asked, I don't understand their failure to answer interview questions and to write curriculum vitaes.
Computers and Google, answers.com et al, simplified things - there are templates they could have lifted, cut out a few inconsistent facts and then completed the CVs accordingly.
Technology, I am on my knees pray ing as I type this, renders them jobless in the UK for loooong so that they either return or resort to washing half-dead senior citizens. The indignity should spur them to correctly fill out air ticket forms and to write to their relations e-mails back home about their impending return to Africa.

Joshua Masinde said...

You, the kind of jobs they may probably be offered is washing the nigh-to-death sunset citizens. You have trained as a, say, surgeon, you can surely fail a simple question, say, how do you wash an elderly citizen without disturbing their peace?
But, aside from the hard 'facts', jobs or no jons in the UK, most of us dream of going there, even when it means going to sleep on that wreakech of a vehicle for some nights until we fulfil our ambitions (not the ones in VS Naipaul's 'Miguel Street') but those of our imaginative figments.
But, it all starts with us. If have even the smallest job on earthm, you could post a sample CV or a few tips about it to help any interested blokes and to remind ourselves that we need 'kujiseti' as we opt to eat of some of the greener pastures abroad, Deo Volente.

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