Persistent graduate glut and skills scarcity heard in Senate; senators act
COMPOSITE IMAGE: JEROME CRISTOBAL FROM INQ FILE PHOTOS
MANILA, Philippines – The country continues to face employment woes due to the oversupply of graduates and undersupply of skills nationwide, a labor official told a Senate hearing on Wednesday, as senators discussed strategies to bridge the gap.
Carmela Torres, undersecretary of DOLE’s Employment and Human Resource Development Cluster, explained that oversupply can be measured by looking at the country’s graduates in higher education.
“…and there is definitely an oversupply kasi nga may [job] mismatch. Ang graduates natin hindi nagtutugma sa needed by enterprises,” Torres pointed out during the Senate committee hearing on labor, employment and human resources development.
(…and there is definitely an oversupply because of a prevailing job mismatch. Our graduates do not match those needed by enterprises.)
Torres stressed an “oversupply” of graduates and undersupply of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) skills nationwide.
“Meron din tayong undersupply of TVET skills dahil hindi tayo nakaka-employ ng right people sa jobs. Ang quality of our workforce ay mababa,” Torres added.
(We also have an undersupply of TVET skills since we cannot employ the right people for jobs. The country’s quality of the workforce is low.)
Senator Jinggoy Estrada, who presided over the hearing as the chairman of the committee, stressed that the country needs to implement “focused” and “intensive” measures to improve the employability of Filipinos, especially the youth.
The panel discussed several measures that seek to reform and strengthen the country’s national apprenticeship program embodied in the Labor Code of the Philippines.
“Maraming kaalaman at kakayahan ang kailangan ng ating mga industriya na hindi lubos na natututunan ng ating mga kabataan sa paaralan. As a result, the school-to-work transition of Filipino youth is slow,” said Estrada in his opening statement.
(Our industries need a lot of knowledge and skills that our young people don’t adequately learn in school. As a result, the school-to-work transition of Filipino youth is slow.)
“An important intervention to address this perennial predicament is through apprenticeship, which provides practical training on the job, founded on relevant theoretical instruction. It seeks to provide the economy with trained workers by addressing the job-skills mismatch and in turn, improving the employability of our people,” he added.
DOLE attributed apprenticeship with “high-level technical skills,” saying that it is different from an On the Job Training (OJT) as the latter can be “short term.”
