By Bernie Cahiles-Magkilat
Dearth in skilled local IT, mismatch between job requirements and available skill set, and gaps in education and training have been identified as among the major challenges faced by the country’s IT sector today.
Despite being a major driver of the country’s economic growth for many years now, with IT-related jobs being one of the most in-demand in the country based on LinkedIn’s 2019 Emerging Jobs in the Philippines Report, IT companies continue to lament the skills gap while IT graduates and professionals find it hard to get the right job.
The report noted that concentration of IT companies in Metro Manila further exacerbates the situation. Many of IT industry leaders focus their operations on the National Capital Region (NCR) even though cities and even provinces outside the NCR have many IT professionals.
As more IT companies make the National Capital Region their center of operations, a growing number of IT professionals move out of their hometowns and relocate to Metro Manila in the hopes of landing better opportunities for themselves and their families. This leaves promising IT startups and business process outsourcing (BPO) offices in the provinces with a diminishing pool of potential IT manpower. Meanwhile, those who have moved to the city may find their previous training and experience insufficient to match job requirements.
The technology, media and communications industries are expected to be the worst hit by talent shortage across the globe, which itself is projected to reach its worst levels by 2030, according to the Korn Ferry Institute’s 2018 Future of Work: The Global Talent Crunch report. A staggering 85.2 million job openings worldwide and 47 million job openings in the Asia Pacific region will go unfilled by then. If unaddressed, this talent demand and supply gap will mean revenue loss for businesses and hindered economic growth for countries across the globe.
ICTjob.ph, the Philippines’ premier IT job portal, hopes to help address these challenges, in particular talent recruitment, in the country’s IT sector.
ICTjob.ph Founder and CEO Fred Tshidimba shares, “It is crucial today more than ever for companies to explore new ways to find, acquire and retain employees with the right set of skills not only to boost competitiveness but also to enable companies to cushion themselves from IT talent acquisition challenges and the impending talent shortage. At ICTjob.ph, we provide the platform to streamline the employee-employer matchmaking process and help build linkages for our partners through the industry connections that we have established over the years.”
To support its vision of addressing the local IT talent gap, ICTjob.ph works with NGOs, companies, and colleges and universities to provide programs and upskills training for IT professionals and those new to the sector.
ICTjob.ph also provides internship opportunities and conducts campus tours. Some of the company’s partner universities are the Mapua Institute of Technology, University of the Philippines through the UP Career Assistance Program for Engineering Students (CAPES) and the UP Association for Computing Machinery (UP-ACM), University of Santo Tomas, De La Salle-College of St. Benilde, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, AMA University, STI College and the Technological Institute of the Philippines.
As technology continues to reshape the way IT organizations find and acquire their workforce, ICTjob.ph hopes to be more than just a platform for job search but an enabler of progress in the Philippine IT industry as well.