TECH4GOOD
Monchito Ibrahim
The Philippine tech industry is projecting that it will be creating 150,000 new positions for application developers in the next six years. This is part of the 1.1 million new jobs that the industry is expected to produce by 2028. These figures will be one of the highlights of the Philippine IT-BPM Roadmap 2028 which will be launched next week. Does the Philippines currently have the right programs to produce the talents needed by the tech sector?
Many of our tech industry leaders believe that their sector would have grown much faster if only the supply of the right talents has not been an issue. In the case of the software industry, the problem is aggravated by factors like declining interest in IT-related courses among college entrants and the low programming proficiency levels of IT graduates. These issues have resulted in thousands of unfilled programmer positions for several decades now forcing companies to invest in their own training programs just to address their needs.
This picture is a sharp contrast to what has always been highlighted: the lack of available jobs and the fast-growing number of unemployed or underemployed college graduates in the country. The situation is very clear. A large section of the workforce is not skilled enough to fill up most of the available jobs. We need to bear in mind too that it is not just about having the necessary technical skills. They also need to have essential 21st-century skills like critical thinking and analysis, decision-making, and collaboration.
Where lies the disconnect?
We have seen how the government and even the private sector are doing their best to market the Filipino workforce to the foreign market. Along with this, several training initiatives are currently being conducted to prepare our workers for foreign jobs. We have seen through all these years how sending our fathers and mothers to work abroad has created social issues in the country. But for many of us, sending them abroad is the only available recourse for them to be gainfully employed not realizing that a lot of these available local jobs would be paying them the same, if not better, salaries. Should we not be preparing these workers to take on local jobs instead?
Admittedly, not all jobs in the tech industry are meant for everyone, especially programming. Considering, however, that we have about 200,000 graduates from tech-related courses annually, the talent gap should not be as bad as how it is now. The problem is many of these graduates are assessed not to be proficient enough to readily take on the available jobs. The absorption rate in the other tech jobs such as those in business process management operations is even worse where it is currently less than 10 percent meaning that out of 100 applicants, only 10 are assessed to be readily hirable.
There is an urgent need therefore to increase the funnel of potential hires and improve their chances of being hired. Without jumping the gun on the strategies prescribed in the new industry roadmap, we can look at some possible solutions to address the situation.
The passage of the Digital Workforce Competitiveness Act authored by Senator Sonny Angara is a good start. It mandates agencies like NEDA, CHED, TESDA, and DICT to implement upskilling and reskilling programs to help our workforce develop digital skills. DTI and DICT, in collaboration with other agencies and the relevant industry sectors, are also working on the development of the Philippine Skills Framework. Patterned after the Singapore Skills Framework with a great degree of localization, it is designed to be used as a guide for the implementation of skills development projects in the country.
TESDA used to have its near-hire programs to address the skills gap of candidates assessed to be almost ready for the jobs. They used to also have certificate courses in programming. These programs were developed more than 10 years ago and may need to be aligned with the current needs of the industry.
Many tech employers today are more skills oriented rather than focused on credentials. They are open to hiring senior high school graduates who have taken the STEM and IT tracks and are able to show adequate proficiency in the different job roles required by the industry. But we need to see more senior high students taking these tracts. We should look at ways to make science, tech, and math interesting to our young kids. Maybe exposing them to coding and robotics in their early years would help.
Solutions to address the situation will need both a whole-of-government approach and very close collaboration with the industry. The President may have to step in to ensure that everyone will be moving in one direction. The competitiveness of our tech industry hangs on our ability to finally bridge the skills gaps.
(The author is the lead convenor of the Alliance for Technology Innovators for the Nation (ATIN), vice president of the Analytics Association of the Philippines, and vice president, UP System Information Technology Foundation.)