THE Philippines’ labor pool for the information technology industry growing, but not fast enough, a recently concluded study shows.

The study was conducted in the first quarter of the year by XMG, an information and communications technology (ICT) research and advisory think-tank of leading offshoring and outsourcing countries that include China, India, Malaysia and Philippines.

It shows that the average growth of the IT labor pool in the Philippines in the last five years rests at 10 percent and is forecast to grow by another three percent in the next two to three years.

Despite the increase, the study revealed that there is an insufficient labor pool to sustain the total ICT growth in the Philippines alone, which is projected to grow by 30 percent to 35 percent until 2010.

“Majority of fresh talents will be sourced from Metro Manila making up 22 percent of the estimated 50,000 to 60,000 graduates annually,” the XMG study showed.

XMG statistician Benedict Dormitorio said “there is a clear need to establish additional training institutions and ladderized-degree programs by existing universities to boost the dwindling talent supply due to the growth of the Philippine offshoring industry and the migration of [the country’s] IT-skilled workforce to the United States, Singapore, Canada, Middle East and Europe.”

Dormitorio also underscored the importance of ensuring the correct “curriculum alignment” by educational institutions to match the existing market needs of the ICT industry through close consultation with ICT companies and organizations.

The study showed an overview of available IT manpower based on skill sets. XMG segmented the labor supply by educational attainment, with at least a four-year bachelor’s degree and other IT vocational courses and skill sets like programming, business solutions and networking.

The study identified a skills shortage in Python, VBScript, Perl, XML and VB.net programmers in the Philippines due to the low incident count from the general IT worker population. “For programming and business solutions, IT skills on SAS, SAP, Lotus Notes and MySQL will be increasingly difficult to source and companies must be prepared to pay a premium price to recruit these individuals,” the study said.

It warned that networking skills—particularly in network administration—will be at risk.

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RP’s IT labor pool not growing fast enough

THE Philippines’ labor pool for the information technology industry growing, but not fast enough, a recently concluded study shows.

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