The relevant government agencies of the Philippines have been working on ‘global certifications’ that could be accorded for the right-skilling of workers that will be joining the labor force of the country’s flourishing renewable energy (RE) sector.

According to Energy Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla, the Department of Energy (DOE) has been collaborating with the other government agencies – primarily the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) “so that we can actually right-skill our people to be able to seize the opportunities for the RE and cleaner technology rollout.”

Right-skilling refers to the process of tailoring the training of workers so they can keep pace with the specific needs of an industry or organization, especially for the highly skilled facet of a labor force.

Part of the efforts being advanced by the DOE, the energy chief noted, is to pursue global certifications for the Filipino workers so their opportunities will not just be confined in the Philippines, but also globally.

“At the international level, we are working with a number of like-minded countries for us to have international certification system for our labor force that will therefore allow us to share our skilled labor force with the rest of the world when the climate transition ramps up,” Lotilla stressed.

This early, the government of Denmark has already sounded off support to the reskilling and upskilling of at least 50,000 technical-oriented workers in the RE sector, with target of global certifications that may be bestowed by the International Labour Organization (ILO), International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the global wind industry associations.

From the pre-development phase to construction and commercial operations of the pipelined RE projects in the country, it is expected that millions of ‘green jobs’ can be created in the domestic industry – and that could also entice even overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) with technical skills to return and will just take employment at home.

Lotilla emphasized “we don’t want to have a repeat of a situation that we have to import foreign labor in order to seize job opportunities for the power sector.”

He said it is not only in the development and construction of power plants that Filipino works can take hold of golden job opportunities, but it is also in the expansion and reinforcement of the transmission facilities underpinning the grid integration of the RE installations.

“In the Philippines, we need to train so that we don’t import foreign labor in order to build our transmission lines – it boils down to that. What does that mean for example? If we are going to have a rollout of our transmission lines, we’re going to increase the level of construction – we need skilled persons for that,” the energy secretary expounded.

Apart from RE, he stated that parallel move is similarly being explored for the labor force that will be continuously deployed in the upstream and downstream segments of the country’s gas sector – especially so since new round of exploration and drilling activities will soon be firmed up for the Malampaya gas field.

“That’s part of the initiative that we are undertaking as far as upskilling and there are also a number of things that we are looking at on natural gas, we have already initiated discussions with other countries,” Lotilla asserted.

In the ramp up of RE developments for the transformation of the country’s energy mix toward clean energy technologies, gas is lined up as the perfect technology coupling that can help manage the intermittency of solar and wind resources.