When we talk of upskilling business executives, we are usually referring to technical skills like those required in the functional areas of sales and marketing, finance, production, information technology, and people management. In my experience as a professor in schools of business here and abroad for more than half a century, it is equally, if not more, important to upskill many of our executives in critical thinking, effective communication, and human relations. For these “soft” skills, it is sometimes more important to offer so-called hard-nosed executives a modified version of the liberal arts education, which many of them missed during their undergraduate years because of the trends in the last decades or so toward very early specialization in our universities. I remember the decades of the fifties and sixties when the top Philippine university, the University of the Philippines, required all its college students—whatever their intended “majors”—to go through two years of “general education.” For a while, I taught part-time at U.P., lecturing to hundreds of first- and second-year students in the so-called Arts Auditorium. I was teaching them, through these so-called magisterial lectures, the principles of economics from the liberal arts point of view. This was reminiscent of my experience at Harvard when I was a teaching fellow assisting Nobel Prize winners in economics who delivered similar lectures on economics to large audiences of first- and second-year students in the College of Arts and Sciences. After these lectures, the students would then be organized into smaller groups of 30 to 40 each, and it was the turn of teaching fellows to further elucidate what they heard from the brilliant professors. Unfortunately, this practice has been abandoned at U.P. as more and more specialized courses no longer required the strong liberal arts foundation of the past.

In this regard, I am especially keen on replicating a customized program for the SGV Accounting firm in the 1970s in which I was involved. The late Roberto V. Ongpin was then the Head of the Management Services division of SGV. He realized what was especially evident to me because of my having majored in accounting during my undergraduate years at De La Salle College. Especially during those pre-digital times, Accounting majors spent an inordinate amount of time performing repetitive and mechanical tasks involved in bookkeeping, posting entries into trial balances, preparing by hand or typewriter profit and loss statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flows, and flow of funds. They had very little time left to read the Great Books. They were mostly unfamiliar with the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates; of Dante, St. Thomas, and St. Augustine. They did not know how to appreciate the music of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, or Chopin, nor the paintings of Michelangelo, Murillo, or Picasso. In short, most of the bright CPAs and other accountants who worked for SGV lacked a strong liberal arts foundation that rendered many of them relatively poor in writing and speaking and generally lacking in culture. Bobby knew that this shortcoming would make it very difficult for these otherwise bright accountants to rise to top management levels because of their limited culture and lack of communications skills.

So Bobby asked CRC to put together some of our best professors, together with some top liberal arts teachers from the University of the Philippines (which at that time had a solid “general education” program as a foundation for any college specialization), to offer their accountants a customized liberal arts program. We included literature, philosophy, history, economics, music, and fine arts in the curriculum for the SGV accountants. A good number of those who participated in this customized mini-liberal arts program subsequently rose to the top management of SGV and other major business enterprises of the Philippines and abroad. I must also point out that as predominantly a business school, UA&P prides itself on having a high-quality curriculum for business or management undergraduates because both the junior college and the first two years of any professional specialization we offer are strongly grounded in the liberal arts or the humanities. This strong liberal arts background is a very valuable asset of our graduates as they subject themselves to a lifetime of learning in the never-ending upskilling and reskilling process required by the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the catching up we have to do because of having failed to complete the first three stages of Industrialization, IR 1.0, IR 2.0, and IR 3.0. On a personal note, I am always grateful that as I started my college years at De La Salle College in 1954, the so-called LIA-COM (Liberal Arts-Commerce) track was offered for the first time. I was able then to combine my study of Accounting with a large dosage of literature, philosophy, history, and other liberal arts subjects. Modesty aside, I partly attribute my being one of the CPA topnotchers in 1958 to the liberal arts subjects that honed my critical thinking and communications skills.

Upskilling and reskilling top executives and professional people in the Humanities will be my special concern as a member of the teaching staff at the recently launched Continuing Real World Education Center (CORE) in Cebu. Using UA&P CORE as a platform, this newly established Center will provide curated, relevant, and responsive programs to suit the needs of upskilling and reskilling of business and other organizations in the fast-growing regional markets in the Visayas and Mindanao, such as Cebu, Iloilo, Bacolod, Cagayan de Oro, and Davao City, as well as the neighboring markets in Indonesia and Vietnam. Of course, there will be the traditional short non-degree programs that will be offered in the CORE of Cebu, replicating those already offered in the National Capital Region. Some of these programs are:

-Customized executive and management development programs -General management courses related to effective communication and leadership programs, media management, project and middle management training -Benchmarked and relevant governance programs and certifications, data governance and data protection officer courses, applied sustainability management -Succession programs promoting unity in the family and the family business -Certificate programs on strategic business economics and agribusiness -Church management seminar -Graduate management certificate course

UA&P CORE’s state-of-the-art facilities will be housed in the heart of the Cebu Business Park on the 12th floor of Latitude Corporate Center on Mindanao Avenue, Cebu City. UA&P CORE has an Advisory Board composed of prominent executives and academic leaders from its ranks of professors, governance team, alumni, and associate schools both here and abroad, including one of the top business schools in the world, the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. Already this coming May 4 to 6, 2025, a group of some 30 top Philippine executives will be traveling to Barcelona to attend an upskilling seminar on Artificial Intelligence. For comments, my email address is [email protected].