Walk the Talk

April 16, 2007

I was browsing through the Sunday papers and found myself lost in the hundreds of wanted jobs in the classifieds. Come to think of it, there are thousands of unemployed professionals, yet weekly ads of jobs in the news keeps on coming. Not to mention those vacancies that’s only available by referral and hasn’t been published. My point here I guess is that we produce thousands of fresh graduates annually yet a lot of schools fail to produce caliber graduates that’ll technically be able to meet the demands of the industries. Is it the fault of CHED or related authorities for failing to identify key areas needed in the industries of our economy? That is not for me to answer. But say for the call center industry, which is still pointing to an upward scale and probably isn’t going to stay at equilibrium yet, they are only requiring a very basic requirement that ideally fresh graduates should’ve been armed already – Fluency in the English language. However, the sad state is that, a lot of these call center companies are rejecting hundreds of these applicants everyday solely because they find most applicants with poor command in the language. We, who’ve pride ourselves as among the top English speaking countries (a universal language), are regressing at the very least at arming the students with the proper command of the language, among others, the technical skills and key competencies that the companies are requiring.

The authorities, whoever they are, needs to address the graduate’s lack of proper skills and identify which industries need which courses, and work with the colleges and universities in reforming its curricula. This is perhaps one of the reasons most top corporations of our country knows only of employing from a handful of top universities and colleges. And we hear people coming from never-heard-schools whining and crying foul over companies that are school biased. Come on, I really do understand why. Most of the unknown private schools we have now are only profit-oriented colleges that miserably fail to potently aid their alumni with proper knowledge and text-based trainings that are needed in the corporate arena. For instance, from the university where I came from, at that time, we are only paying a quarter of tuition fees from what our counterparts in Ateneo De Manila are paying, yet, the university produced top accountants, lawyers and engineers with passing rates comparable to that of the top schools in Metro Manila. It must be with the syllabus and the standard. Schools need not collect high tuition fees in order to produce top rated students. There must be something that the Jesuits in Davao are able to cost effectively meet the demands of the students. One time I went to a school that has consistently produced top engineers here in metro manila where I’ve heard heavily charges on tuition fees, and I was aghast by the physical state of their campus. I don’t know how they were able to produce engineers there (must be with the curriculum) but I tell you, the campus’ environment really is not conducive for learning. Where are they appropriating the bloated fees they’re charging from the students? The list goes on, I could only pity those students enrolling in schools where their parents’ hard earned money is not worth the spend.

The way forward is a reform in our educational system, not just aiding our youth to become competent employees that can offer better services for local and international pooling in the future but also enhance awareness that there is a better way beyond being a wage earner- spark their interest in business and arm them with entrepreneurial skills which will be beneficial to our economy.  We know this for a fact, for those who are cynical out there, and Filipino as we are- contented at maintaining status quo, we are really far behind the emerging markets in Asia now. If we boast ourselves, as Filipinos, of being competitive and “magaling”, then why not walk the talk as well?