Foreign domestic helpers are expected to do a lot of things and to cover so much ground around the house – to the point that even when there are no adults left to manage the house, the domestic worker can readily step in and take charge – oftentimes with the kids and elderly people in tow. It’s no wonder that a lot of the household workers easily get burned out and physically drained from doing all the work assigned to them for a minimal pay, sadly.
Homemaking is no easy thing and this requires certain level of management and organization skills apart from the common ones performed at home such as cleaning, cooking, doing the laundry, and so on.
FDH’s Household Skills to be Assessed by Agency’s Pilot Programme
A programme to gauge and certify a foreign domestic worker’s homemaking skills is currently under development by the Centre for Domestic Employees (CDE), in the hopes of addressing work expectations between workers and employers, as shared in a report by the Straits Times.
The organisation, which looks after the needs and interest of domestic workers in Singapore, had discovered in a 2017 survey that most of the employers felt that their maids were not adequately equipped with skills despite the workers’ claims to have undergone training.
According to the CDE’s executive director Shamsul Kamar Mohamed Razali, this type of perception mismatch oftentimes ends up in disharmony and strained working relationships, noting that the survey has only found 54 percent of the 1004 employers surveyed to have full trust of their employees’ skills and training background.
In contrast, almost all of the 1,012 workers surveyed claimed to have undergone some kind of training.
The programme – dubbed as the Assessment-Only-Pathway (AOP) skills certification framework – could also urge employment agents to enhance the quality and delivery of their training programmes, explained Mr. Shamsul.
The programme was conceptualized by the organization together with NTUC LearningHub.
As per the CDE, the vision is to assure employers that those who have certification possess the expected skill-sets, which translate to the quality of work.