Students who graduated during the pandemic pose for this picture taken on Dec. 29, 2020. (INQUIRER.net stock photo)
The Department of Education (DepEd) is crafting a new curriculum that will remove the supposed skepticism of many industries in hiring applicants who graduated in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are about to launch a new curriculum that has been a result of substantial conversations. We actually consulted with the industries. We had to find out why there is a reluctance when hiring our graduates,” DepEd assistant secretary for operations Dexter Galban said.
The move comes after the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) reported that fresh graduates experienced difficulty in finding jobs allegedly due to lack of “soft skills.”
These skills were supposedly more developed among students who attended face-to-face classes.
“While the K-to-12 Program assumes to equip senior high school graduates with competencies and skills not just for further studies but also for employment, not much attention is given to developing their life and soft skills,” said the report.
Examples of soft skills are empathy, leadership, responsibility, integrity, self-esteem, flexibility and sociability.
Galban told the Inquirer that DepEd officials talked with experts in different business enterprises to gauge the environments that K-12 students face after graduation.
They consulted executives who were in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), accountancy, business and management (ABM), and humanities and social sciences (HUMSS).
The department is in the final stages of developing the new syllabus.
“I have yet to see the final version because, as operations, I will adjust our approaches. We are the support services. We will adjust our approach to match the framing of the curriculum,” Galban said.
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