Date Posted: April 10, 2009
Source: Kimberly Jane Tan, GMANews.TV

The Philippine education system focuses too much on famous courses but fails to provide qualified graduates for jobs required abroad, say two recruitment industry leaders.

 

“Many overseas employment opportunities abound in sub-specialties of various occupations but the Philippine education system is either ill-equipped and/or unprepared to offer corresponding courses to the demand but rather do a ‘one course fits all’ mentality," recruitment consultant Emmanuel Geslani told reporters in an e-mail.

 

This, he said, has led to a “disastrous oversupply of unemployable graduates."

 

“In demand careers like respiratory therapists, cardio technicians, laboratory, ct-scan, are often pass[ed] over in favor of more high-profile careers like nurses," he said.

 

Lito B. Soriano, executive director of the Federated Associations of Manpower Exporters, Inc., has said that there has always been a “serious gap" in the education system that reportedly persists in having curriculums that are “unsuitable" in providing their graduates with the possibility of employment.

 

“Of the one million college graduates annually, only five to ten percent are employed in jobs consistent to their course, only 30 to 40 percent will find any employment. The vast majority of graduates will remain unemployed," he said in his study titled “The OFW economic engine, Philippine Reality and Required Reform Arising from the Global Financial Crisis."

 

He added that many local nurses even end up paying for a job in a desperate attempt to obtain the necessary work experience.

 

“There is close to 400,000 licensed nurses who are not gainfully employed and there is an estimated 80,000 board-passers joining the ranks each year," said Soriano.

 

Geslani challenged the education sector to evaluate their current course offerings amid the millions of unemployable college graduates who are joining the labor force each year.

 

“Producing non-employable graduates of courses for which there is no demand could be viewed as unethical and merely a method of generating cash dividends for stockholders or owners," he said.

 

In addition, he said the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) should provide the information needed by Filipino students in choosing “employable careers."

 

“Existing overseas Filipino worker (OFW) information fields are too few, outmoded, and not sufficiently detailed. There is no harmonization of categories, required information or protocols for determining OFW statistics between agencies," said Geslani.

 

The occupational statistics of the POEA are condensed into only eight categories, namely professional and technical workers (14 percent), administrative and managerial (three percent), clerical workers (four percent), sales workers (zero percent), service workers (35 percent), agricultural workers (zero percent), production workers (41 percent), and for reclassification (three percent).

 

The POEA, meanwhile, has previously said that local nursing schools need to strengthen their training programs to give Filipino nurses an edge in the international labor market.