Small businesses stand to benefit from K-12 system

Small businesses, one of the pillars of the country’s economy, stand to benefit the most from the implementation of the so-called K to 12 system this year, local officials from website Jobstreet.com said.

The resulting abundance of high school graduates with blue-collar skills will help entrepreneurs find the workers they need to expand their operations and improve productivity levels, the company said.

“It is these blue-collar workers that keep our economy growing,” said Yoda Buyco, JobStreet Philippine marketing head and managing director.

Of the country’s 40 million workers, only 10 million were in so-called “white collar” or office positions, she said. The rest are employed as laborers or skilled workers that do not necessarily need college degrees for their jobs.

The problem with the previous 10-year basic and secondary education cycle, Buyco said, was that most high school graduates lacked the skills to do any job, making tertiary education a necessity just to find decent employment.

The lack of training in basic education and the inability of many to attend college lead to a job market where many are not trained to do any job, she said.

Businesses big and small, Buyco said, were forced to incur extra costs in training these employees.
With the 12-year cycle that included vocational subjects, Buyco said college would become a mere choice instead of a necessity for all Filipinos. She said this would benefit small businesses that do not need offices full of accountants or business degree holders in their operations.

“Most workers in small businesses are skilled workers. These are blue-collar employees,” she said. “If you’re working as an encoder, you don’t necessarily need college education but you still need to be trained,” Buyco said.

She said Jobstreet.com would start to focus more on engaging both sides of the blue-collar job market: companies looking to hire workers and applicants hoping to fill those positions.

She said the jobs-skills mismatch was also present in the white-collar segment of the market. This is shown by the abundance of available jobs for Filipinos on the Jobstreet.com website, at 80,000, vis-a-vis the joblessness experienced by many in the country.
Official government data pegged the country’s unemployment rate at 7.2 percent—translating to 2.9 jobless Filipinos.

“There are available jobs. It’s just that people are not trained for those jobs,” Buyco said.

The company will hold its annual “Jobgantic” career fair at the SMX Convention Center on June 22 to 23. About 17 percent of the jobs up for grabs at the event will be for engineering-related positions; 14 percent for customer service jobs and 11 percent for marketing and sales specializations. –Paolo G. Montecillo, Philippine Daily Inquirer