Sergio Marchionne, prick up your ears.

Toyota Motor, the once-mighty money machine that grabbed the crown of world’s biggest automaker from General Motors last year, gave a shocking loss forecast today for a staggering $8.6 billion for this year. Culprits are aplenty, but one of them is the company’s mammoth size.

Until the economic crisis slammed the brakes on car sales last year, Toyota couldn’t build them fast enough. To catch up with demand, Toyota put up more factories, from China to the Czech Republic. Reaching annual sales of 10 million vehicles – a feat never achieved by any automaker to date - looked imminent for the 70-year-old carmaker.

Now that rapid expansion has come back to haunt it. With consumers holding back on car purchases the world over, Toyota’s sprawling manufacturing facilities are a liability. Tumbling sales are forcing dozens of its factories to work half-days, costing the company billions. This year, it expects to build 6.3 million vehicles — 800,000 fewer than it did in the year that ended on March 31.

Size is a tricky business. Economics says that scale breeds savings, but at the same time, it makes carmakers less nimble. Striking a balance can be tough even for a company like Toyota, which has grown organically as an independent carmaker. Rivals such as General Motors and Volkswagen, meanwhile, have become bigger partly by scooping up brands, often outside their home markets, so achieving synergies is even more difficult.

In the late 1990s, former Daimler-Benz Chairman Juergen Schrempp had a vision of creating an auto empire and took over Chrysler to form DaimlerChrysler, which went on to buy stakes in Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor. Now, all of those ties have effectively been severed. The moral of Schrempp’s failure was: Size isn’t the formula for success.

It’s puzzling, then, that Sergio Marchionne, the dynamic chief executive of Italy’s Fiat, is treading a similar path.

The Italian-Canadian CEO is looking to super-size Fiat by combining with the newly bankrupt Chrysler and GM’s German arm, Opel, in the belief that the Italian carmaker needs the resulting “industrial efficiency” to survive. Toyota’s announcement today should be a wake-up call for Mr Marchionne.

Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) Secretary Marianito Roque defended the conduct of job fairs held in several parts of the country and stated that these are not mere gimmicks.

Secretary Roque said, in a statement released at DOLE website, that job fairs are crucial measures in helping employers find appropriate skills they need, at the same time, facilitating the placement of workers in need of jobs. He further claimed that a total of 1,032 job fairs were conducted nationwide between January and November last year which offered 1.34 million job vacancies.

Sec. Roque cleared that not all job vacancies are filled up immediately after job fairs since companies still undergo rigid selection of short listed applicants met through job fairs. “Selection may start with an initial interview of applicants as the fair is going on…the recruitment of selected applicants who troop to job fairs usually takes place at the company level, where management makes the final choice out of initial interviews and résumés of jobseekers it had gathered during a job fair,” the Secretary adds.

Moreover, skill mismatch is still a perennial problem among applicants given that most jobseekers do not have the necessary qualifications or skills required by the employers. This entails the company to continuously participate in other job fairs to be able to find the applicant they are looking for.

Sec. Roque adds, “job fair also offers services whereby workers are given opportunities to embark on livelihood projects or to undergo skills training and upgrading to enable them meet the skills requirements of industry."

Please visit the Trabaho.com Events and Seminar page for a list of job fairs in the Metro.

Guess what? Another fender bender accident earlier. Dont judge me yet though. It was not my fault that the other car hit what I was driving earlier in downtown Chicago.

I am not accident prone. The other guy was just not paying attention.

I was driving down in Michigan Avenue (Magnificent Mile) going to Randolf Rd. to pick up some people at Millenium Park. When I got to Randolf Rd the light was red and I had to wait for the green arrow only to turn left. Well the green arrow lit up and I step on the pedal and went off to turn left. I was already getting on Randolf and I notice the other car north bound of Michigan Avenue trying to turn right to Randolf Rd. I noticed that he was coming in too fast, I tried to get away but he was already really close. I noticed that he tried to get away too but I was too late for him as well.

He hit my right front fender and luckily just a little dent. He admitted the whole thing was his fault right away though. I desided to call the police instead of just exchanging information simply because my car was a rental. We settled the whole thing and Kenley will be paying for all damages on my car.

Case dimissed.

Trabaho.com has been the Filipino job seeker's partner since 1996, the year when it became the premiere online recruitment site in the country.

Conceptualized and developed by the creative minds of Web Philippines, Inc., the site aims to provide global Filipinos with an accessible venue for limitless career opportunities, for corporate organizations to receive time-saving and cost-effective online recruitment solutions, and to support government initiatives for improving the employment situation in the country.

Now empowered with a roster of highly competitive services and a better design, Trabaho.com is set to fulfill its role of being the jobseeker's your "Complete Online Career Resource."

Thanks to the help of its strategic partners today, job seekers can expect to be greatly empowerment in charting their career path.