PBED partners with USAID to tackle job mismatch problem

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippine Business for Education (PBED), an organization of the country’s top corporate bigwigs espousing the raising of the country’s quality of education, has partnered with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for the holding of the 2013 Summit for Higher Education to tackle the country’s persisting job mismatch problem.

Ramon del Rosario Jr., PBED chairman, said that the two-day summit being held at the Mactan Shangri-la Resort and Spa in Cebu, has successfully gathered heads of the country’s top universities and colleges, both from state universities and colleges (SUCs), and private higher education institutions (HEIs), as well as the business sector, as well as top officials of the Commission on Higher Education, to discuss the inability of HEIs and SUCs, and also local government colleges and universities, to produce graduates that are needed, and employable by business and industry.

Del Rosario said that there was a need for Philippine colleges and universities to step up and do their duty in producing graduates that satisfy the requirements of local and foreign companies especially those in the country to ensure the sustained growth of the Philippine economy.

“Industry believes that our country is poised for more growth in the years to come. The Philippines has weathered the global financial crisis and has registered robust growth despite the global economic climate,” Del Rosario said during the opening of the recent two-day summit.

“Business, however, recognizes that to sustain this growth, we need to insure the development of our people. If we are to continue to build our competitiveness, it must be built on the backs of a more competitive, qualified Filipino people,” he said.

The resilience of the Philippine economy has been attributed to continued growth in the dollar and foreign currency remittances of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), as well as the strong consumer spending attributed to the growing number of young working Filipinos especially those working in business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, led by call centers that offer above minimum wage salary rates.

The continued growth of the BPO industry in the Philippines, however, is being hindered by the growing problem of scarcity of workers that have the basic English communication and computer skills needed for call center work.

While more US companies want to outsource work to Philippine BPO companies, these companies are prevented from growing by a lack of employable workers, while thousands of young Filipinos, and college graduates at that, are left unemployed.

Local and foreign companies have also complained of a lack of information technology (IT) workers, and engineers who satisfy their requirements while there are many unemployed engineering and IT graduates but lack “soft skills,” mainly the basic communication and problem solving skills.