AFTER a 12-year break from the workforce, Madam V. Thilagarani found herself knocking on the doors of five employers for a job.

She did not land a single one.

At 42 and an Indian, she found herself passed over for being too old, or for not being able to speak Mandarin.

But the mother of two teenage kids refused to give up.

She felt that a job would help her get over the death of her father, a stroke patient for whom she quit her last job so she could care for him.

'I wanted something to keep me occupied... I was not going to waste my time like that,' she said.

The turning point came when she went to the Workforce Development Agency for help.

She got the job of patient services clerk at the Singapore General Hospital partly on the strength of her previous experience as a data-entry clerk at the Ministry of Law.

She needed some training first, though, since health care was a new ballgame for her.

The nine-month course she is taking will equip her with skills ranging from registering patients to sending blood samples for lab tests.

When she graduates in May, her new job will pay her between $1,100 and $1,300, against the $700 she used to make in the past.

'My family is very happy for me,' she said.

'At the end of the day, the satisfaction is there when the patient says 'Thank you'.'

Manpower Minister Ng Eng Hen cited Madam Thilagarani as one of the success stories of the Job Re-creation Programme spearheaded by the NTUC.

The Government is allocating $40 million to expand the programme to create 10,000 jobs for Singaporeans each year.