MANILA, Philippines – Among all member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Philippines has become the standard when it comes to engineering skills in the construction industry, the top official of a Philippine construction company said.
“In preparation for the Asean economic integration by 2015, there was a harmonization of trade skills in construction. When we reviewed the levels of the skills of all the countries in Asean, the benchmark is the Philippines,” Levy Espiritu, President of DATEM Inc. said during a roundtable discussion with reporters last June 26, 2014.
“Look at the big [construction] firms doing business in Singapore, the management is almost all Filipino,” he said.
Under the Asean integration process, the qualifications of select profession in the region will be aligned in order to allow the free movement of professionals between member states.
These professions are engineering, nursing, architecture, surveying, medical practitioners, dentistry, accountancy, and tourism.
Espiritu attributed the high-quality skills of Filipino engineers to the education system and the trainings they get with Philippine construction firms.
“If you look at the rank of our schools compared to other Asean countries and all over the world, we have a lot of schools that are strong in engineering. Coupled with English as the medium of instruction, we have an advantage,” Espiritu said.
“Even though we open the engineering industry, and for example Vietnamese engineers come in, they cannot compete with the Filipinos. On the positive side, our engineers can go to Vietnam to work,” he said.
Arnold De Asis, DATEM Inc. Vice President for Operations, cited the many Filipino engineers who are hired in rapidly growing places in the Middle East such as Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, in Saudi Arabi, Qatar, and Kuwait.
Espiritu however pointed out that the booming construction industry in the Philippines allows those who went abroad to come back to the country and find work here instead.
“Before, we lost our engineers and our architects to the Middle East, then there was a shift and we are losing them to Macau and Singapore and so on. But because of the boom in the industry right now, you see construction everywhere, we lose our engineers and architects to local competitors,” he said.
“There is no need for them to go out of the country, because now it’s very competitive even in terms of salary,” Espiritu added.
The high-quality of engineers in the Philippines translates into high-quality buildings also making the country a leader in building design and innovation, he said.
“We are advanced with respect to building construction, even if you go to other Asean countries you don’t see high-rise buildings being built to the same quality that the Philippines is doing right now,” Espiritu said.
“We cannot compare it because we have the edge over them, even with respect to designs, the innovations in technology and methodology, the Filipino still has the advantage,” he said.