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THE
National Competitiveness Council (NCC) is bidding to
solve the country’s perennial problem on job-skills
mismatch in three years through a well-coordinated and
widely accepted on-the-job training (OJT) and
“dual-tech” program.
Ambassador Cesar Bautista, co-chairman of the NCC, said
the council has already spearheaded a campaign that will
make the longer stay of students to the workplace rather
than schools acceptable to the various stakeholders,
including the industries, academe, and government
agencies such as the Department of Education, Commission
on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education
and Skills Development Authority (Tesda).
Bautista
said a discussion on this will be the focus in the
People Competitiveness Summit on November 15 at the
Dusit Hotel in Makati City.
He said
their target is to increase the number of dual-tech
programs graduate to 200,000 annually in three years
from the current 40,000.
To do
this, Bautista said they will be needing more schools
aside from the Meralco Foundation, Don Bosco and
Dual-Tech Foundation to adopt this program in their
curricula.
Students
enrolled in this scheme spend longer hours in the actual
workplace than in schools.
“We
would be solving the mismatch with a good OJT and
dual-tech program. A new curriculum should be developed
with more OJTs and we hope it will become more
accepted,” Bautista said.
He said
in the People Competitiveness Summit, which is being
organized by the NCC, they will identify the type of
jobs that industries need, get the blessings of the
agencies like DepEd, Ched and Tesda, and urge the
companies to participate.
Emerico
O. de Guzman, the champion of the private sector in the
NCC’s Competitive Human Resource Work Group, said they
will be concentrating initially in solving the mismatch
in key industries such as semiconductor and electronics,
business process outsourcing (BPO), hotel and
restaurant, and health.
“We
would bring them together so they could mention their
gripes to the government and the educational
institutions,” de Guzman said.
Ruy
Moreno, a private sector director of the NCC, said the
hard- to-fill-in jobs in the priority sectors are
geologist, mining engineers and metallurgical engineers
for mining; cooks, tour guides, reservation officers,
butlers and baristas for hotels and restaurants;
welders, fabricators, pipe fitters and marine
electricians for shipbuilding; doctors, nurses, spa
therapists and massage therapists for health and
wellness; architects and engineers, welders, riggers and
heavy equipment mechanic for construction; and 3D and 2D
animators, accountants, engineers, programmers, agents,
transcriptionists and editors for the BPO.
He said
some of the skills that the country is lacking do not
necessarily require college graduates like cooks,
baristas, butlers, welders, fabricators and construction
workers.
Bautista
said in the case of the BPOs, their objective is to
bring down the current employee turnover rate of 50
percent to 20 percent and also increase further the
present low recruitment rate of 10 percent.
For
electronics and other industries, Bautista said they are
seeking to help companies save on time and cost arising
from the up to 18 months of training that they are
currently giving to fresh graduates before they become
really productive.
De
Guzman said graduates in the dual-tech program have
almost a 100-percent chance of getting hired since they
have already acclimatized themselves in the work
conditions and are already familiar to the companies
that they trained with during their OJT.
The
Joint Foreign Chambers has also rolled out a program in
which its member-companies have committed to partner
with different schools in an OJT program where
student-participants spend two years of their college
days in the workplace. |
