Bermuda Jobs Site Getting Noticed

Published: October 14, 2008

by Alex Woodie

A Government of Bermuda Web site dedicated to connecting citizens with jobs in their native land is gaining the attention of thousands of Bermudians across the island nation. The Web site, which was created using created using LANSA tools, is running on an IBM System i server.

The Web site, www.careers.gov.bm, provides an on-line database of information about Bermudian college and university students and graduates, as well as jobs that are available to these young people.

Bermuda created the Web site as a tool to connect native Bermudians with jobs. Recruiting qualified Bermudian citizens poses a challenge for the country, which has the third highest per capita income in the world and an unemployment rate of less than one percent. As a result of this challenging jobs situation (for the job seekers), many Bermudian university graduates seek jobs overseas, resulting in a workforce that's composed of nearly 9,000 expatriate work permit holders, mostly in upper-level management.

"Employers would rather recruit Bermudians, as it is an expensive and lengthy procedure to arrange work permits for overseas job candidates," says the Honorable Dale D. Butler, Minister of Culture and Social Rehabilitation. "There are Bermudians who have studied overseas and will want to return to Bermuda and work in their fields of study. There are also graduates locally who may be seeking an opportunity to work in their fields of study. The careers site develops these relationships and enhances the recruitment process, informing all Bermudian stakeholders of the growing opportunities and talents in the various sectors.

"The Bermudian government already had a substantial investment in IBM System i technology, and also was familiar with the LANSA's development tools for the platform. "We selected LANSA because they had a deep understanding of what our requirements were and came up with additional ideas that we felt were valuable," says David Atwood, director of E-Government. "LANSA and their business partner BITS (Bermuda Information Technology Services) had already been involved in various other government projects."

BITS worked with LANSA's professional services division to build the Web site. The developers used LANSA Integrator and Web Access Modules (WAMs) to build and implement the site, which utilizes AJAX techniques to make the site appeal more to the younger crowd.

The entire site runs off a System i Model 520 hosted in a third-party data center. "By hosting it externally we took away some of the delays that may have occurred in setting up the infrastructure ourselves," Atwood explains. "Also, most students are in America and Canada, another reason why hosting works well."

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