When we talk about upskilling business executives, we usually think of technical skills needed in functional areas like sales and marketing, finance, production, information technology, and people management. However, in my more than half-century of experience as a professor in business schools here and abroad, it's equally, if not more, important to upskill many of our executives in critical thinking, effective communication, and human relations. For these soft skills, it's sometimes crucial to offer so-called hard-nosed executives a modified version of the liberal arts education that many of them missed during their undergraduate years. This omission is largely due to the trend in recent decades towards very early specialization in our universities.

I recall the 1950s and 60s, when the University of the Philippines, then the top Philippine university, required all its college students—regardless of their intended majors—to complete 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 Arts Auditorium. Through these magisterial lectures, I taught them the principles of economics from a liberal arts perspective. This was reminiscent of my experience at Harvard, where I was a teaching fellow assisting Nobel Prize winners in economics who delivered similar lectures to large audiences of first and second-year students in the College of Arts and Sciences. After these lectures, students would be organized into smaller groups of 30 to 40, and it was the teaching fellows' turn to further elucidate what they'd heard from the brilliant professors. Unfortunately, this practice has been abandoned at U.P., as more and more specialized courses no longer require the strong liberal arts foundation of the past.

In this regard, I'm particularly keen on replicating a customized program for the SGV Accounting firm from the 1970s, in which I was involved. The late Roberto V. Ongpin was then the Head of SGV's Management Services division. He recognized something especially clear to me, given my accounting major during my undergraduate years at De La Salle College. Especially in those pre-digital times, accounting majors spent an inordinate amount of time on repetitive, mechanical tasks: bookkeeping, posting entries into trial balances, and 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 didn't 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, which made 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 communication skills.

So, Bobby asked CRC to assemble some of our best professors, along 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). Their mission was 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 top management at SGV and other major business enterprises in 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 for our graduates as they embark on a lifetime of learning in the never-ending upskilling and reskilling process required by Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the catching up we have to do because we failed to complete the first three stages of industrialization: IR 1.0, IR 2.0, and IR 3.0. On a personal note, I'm always grateful that when 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 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 communication 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 for upskilling and reskilling 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 neighboring markets in Indonesia and Vietnam. Of course, there will be traditional short, non-degree programs offered in CORE of Cebu, replicating those already available in the National Capital Region. Some of these programs include:

* Customized executive and management development programs

* General management courses, related to effective communication and leadership programs, media management, and project and middle management training

* Benchmarked and relevant governance programs and certifications, data governance and data protection officer courses, and 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. In fact, from May 4 to 6, 2025, a group of some 30 top Philippine executives traveled to Barcelona to attend an upskilling seminar on Artificial Intelligence.