MAPUA University: Learning to address job-skills mismatch

MANILA, Philippines — As the country continues to grow and industries expand, demand for jobs and skills is also expected to rise along with the pressure on academic institutions to produce well-equipped graduates.

To address the issues of mismatch between graduates  and available jobs in the country, Mapua University intensified its output-based education system to shape future engineers and industry leaders.

According to Mapua president and chief executive officer Reynaldo Vea, the university has partnered with institutions like the Philippine Business for Education to strengthen its workforce development program. “The government needs to work closely with the industries and schools to put together a workforce development plan in the years to come,” he said.  

Vea explained that to fully address this issue, institutions from tertiary education such as the Commission on Higher Education together with their technical panels should set the wheel in motion. “The idea is to define program outcomes or student outcomes in terms of what the graduate should be able to do and be on the time of graduation so that the outcomes can be aligned with industry need,” he said.

But the demand for high-value skills is not only rising in the country but the rest of the ASEAN region as well.

According to Vea, the ASEAN economies are also on a growth path and most of them are looking at the Philippines to supply the talents  they need to fuel their expansions.

“In the case of the Philippines, the supply should be sufficient except in certain areas at certain times,” he said.

Vea said a few years back, the most popular engineering field was Electronics and Communications due to the rapid growth of telcos.

“It has now been overtaken by the number of grads in the civil engineering program due to the construction boom,” Vea said.

Mapua said that with the government’s massive infrastructure program, some of the biggest contractors believe that there may not be enough civil engineers to support this.

“If we want to supply human resources to the local and world market, we need to expand our operations,”  Vea said.

Vea also pointed out that graduates of the K-12 program can help fill the gaps of the mismatch.

According to   Vea, K-12 graduates can fill in positions such as technologists and technicians.“For example, in the semiconductor industry, there’s a need for more technologists and technicians over engineers,” he said.

According to  Vea, the Philippine Qualifications Framework (PQF), which is being referenced against the ASEAN Qualifications Reference Framework, is trying to find the comparability of the country’s  qualifications framework with those of other ASEAN states.

 “This is all for the mobility of professionals and workers in the ASEAN region, but eventually we can reference the European Qualifications framework and so on, for more mobility in line with globalization,” he said.

“So workforce development should already be viewed in the framework of the PQF. A law was recently passed organizing the council to reference the framework with other ASEAN states. Hopefully, with this, we are able to address the issue of job mismatch, the mechanism for this is educational outcomes,” he said.

Mapua started its output-based education system in 2006 and later on received accreditation in 2012.

According to  Vea, output-based education has helped various students studying in the US or those entering ABET-accredited universities.  “Those who went to the US to study, they said they no longer needed to fulfill practical experience in the US nor take additional units in US schools and went directly to the licensure exam. For those pursuing postgraduate education, any ABET-accredited program can facilitate admission to graduate school,” he said.

 “This is hard evidence that the value of Mapuan education is the successful launching of careers. You cannot do this if the students are not educated toward specific competencies that the industries will need. The measure of this is how much the industry values the education they got,” he said.

Going digital 

Mapua is utilizing digital technology to provide outcomes-based education (OBE) to students in order to help them find a job easily when they graduate.

Vea said Mapua wants to see certain outcomes or qualities in its students to prepare them for the requirements of the job after graduation.

 “The ability to apply science and math, to solve engineering problems, ability to appreciate, to be able to understand science and engineering solutions in the context of the ethical, societal and environmental considerations, the ability to work in multi-cultural and interdisciplinary teams, these are the abilities that we hope our students would be able to attain during their stay with us in Mapua and so with other schools,” he said.

To achieve these outcomes, he said Mapua is utilizing digital technology.

 “Digital technology has really been a boon to the education sector and we’re trying to make full use of it,” he said.

Through digital technology, Mapua uses a blended learning approach with faculty members able to conduct lectures in the classroom and online.

Introduced in 2017, Digital Day is declared on days when certain events are taking place,making it difficult for students to go to school.

 “What that means is that everyone stays home or at an internet-connected place, faculty and students alike, and we conduct lectures as if normal, as if it was an ordinary day on same time slots as the class,” Vea said.

Apart from Digital Day, Vea said Mapua came up with another initiative called Digital Rush which it started to make available last year.

With Digital Rush, students in sections with time slots falling during rush hour or from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., as well as 4:30 to 6 p.m. are given the option to take online classes so they would not have to battle traffic.

 “We initially deployed that in Mathematics and there were a lot of takers. My plan there is to have all courses have at least one online section in the interim,” Vea said.

He said Mapua’s two initiatives have so far received positive response from both parents and students. “It’s an easy system to like,” he said.

For the parents, online lectures mean students do not need to go to school and could stay at home. On the part of the students, online lectures make it easier for them to learn as the sessions are recorded and accessible anytime.

 “Those who were not present in the lecture can access them, or those who were present for the lecture but missed some points can review it,” Vea said.

As both Digital Day and Digital Rush are new innovations for Mapua, he said the institution is  undertaking an assessment of the effectiveness of online education in attainment of outcomes and effects on the performance of students.“What we’ve done, part of our institutional development plan, is actually to do research and make it scientific. It’s easy to be anecdotal but we want to be scientific. We now have a team of faculty members who will study the effectiveness of online education in regards to the attainment of outcomes,” he said.