Unresponsive education blamed for job mismatch

The Department of Labor and Employment on Tuesday blamed the country’s academic curriculum for the failure of many Filipino graduates to land jobs that are in line with their college degrees.

Labor department Undersecretary Romeo Lagman said that findings from a recent program of the agency showed that the country’s education curriculum can no longer respond to “the needs of industries and businesses operating in the current global environment.”

“The problem of skills-job mismatch is caused by our education curriculum not being responsive to industry needs,” Lagman told a press briefing that bared the results of a 10-month nationwide study called Project Jobs Fit.

The study aimed to identify local and global industries “that would drive employment growth, including the corresponding skills requirements.”

Lagman said that the country needs an intensified career guidance program that starts from a student’s third year in High School and that includes “gender awareness, current work practices and potential opportunities for both technical-vocational and college courses.”

Director Maria Criselda Sy, the head of the Bureau of Local Employment, said that the findings from Project Jobs Fit are “very good input for the incoming administration.”

President-elect Benigno Aquino 3rd will take his oath of office at Quirino Grandstand in Manila’s Rizal Park (Luneta) today.

Sy said that during consultations with major stakeholders, it was found out that the first two years of the college curriculum focus on basic subjects that had been taken up during the Third Year and Fourth Year of High School.

The proposal was for the first two years in college to introduce subjects that are related to students’ future career.

“It [curriculum] should be ready to adapt to the needs of the industry,” Sy said.
Employment generators

She identified the key employment generators (KEGs), emerging industries, hard-to-fill occupations, in-demand occupations and overseas employment KEGs.

According to Sy, local KEGs are agribusiness, cyberservices, health and wellness, hotel, restaurant and tourism, mining, construction, banking and finance, manufacturing, ownership dwellings and real estate, transport and logistics, wholesale and retail trade, and overseas employment.

Overseas KEGs are healthcare, building and construction, petroleum, oil and gas, energy, hotel and restaurant, tourism gaming industry, information technology and cyberservices, manufacturing, seafaring, electronics, household services and production work.

Emerging industries, or those that will be long-term major sources of employment, are creative industries, diversified and strategic farming, power and utilities and renewable energy.
|
Sy said that hard-to-fill occupations—or employment opportunities that have difficulty in employing Filipinos because of their lack of skills—are agribusiness, cyber-services, health and wellness and hotel, restaurant and tourism.

Major issues include lack of experienced and highly skilled workers, unresponsiveness of the school curriculum to industry needs and poor dissemination of labor market information.
“Sumabay dapat ang educational institution sa demand ng industriya [The educational institutions should keep up with job demand of industries],” Sy said.

Among the recommendations made by the program are making on-the-job training work experience relevant to student’s field of work, strengthening industry-academe linkages, promoting establishment of a government agency to handle human resources concerns, refocusing agricultural courses, intensifying career guidance and labor market information, creating employment opportunities, developing and strengthening emerging industries, harnessing remittances from overseas Filipino workers for investments and reassessing and reviewing the Labor code. –Bernice Camille V. Bauzon, Reporter, Manila Times