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Investing in the Filipino Talent and Enabling the Philippines to Move Up the Global Value Chain By IBPAP
For 2020, IBPAP is targeting to launch a scaled pilot project in cooperation with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP), and its partner associations. Already, a dedicated team for talent attraction and development has convened with possible enabling partners to develop a framework for implementation and monitoring.
With a workforce that has the potential to harness new technological trends, the Philippines can be further empowered to provide unparalleled customer experience to its local and international clients given that enabling conditions are met and appropriate interventions are carried out.
Top priority skill areas have been identified for all six subsectors based on what can be efficiently deployed via online platforms, support countryside development, and improve teleworking capacity of the current and future workforce.
As the voice of the IT-BPM sector, the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) is already making strides on this front— strategizing with key government agencies and academic institutions on how to promote lifelong learning and, more importantly, enable the Filipino talent to pivot to higher-value services. “Though efforts around capacity building had already been a priority for the industry, the pandemic has accelerated the shift to more digital solutions,” said Rey Untal, IBPAP President and CEO. “In this light, developing pre- and in-workforce through a strategic, scalable, and sustainable talent attraction and development initiative has become even more critical for the sector’s continued growth and expansion.”
Developing the Filipino Talent At the center of IBPAP’s talent attraction and development strategy is a proposal to establish a national upskilling and reskilling program, which intends to upskill 1 Million Filipinos over a five-year period. The initiative will offer near-hire training grants, upskilling vouchers, scholarships and immersions, student grants, and tertiary education subsidies for individuals; train-the-trainer programs and massive open online courses (MOOCs) for teachers; and boot camps and teaching opportunities for industry veterans.
By end-of-year, the goal is to upskill 1,000 fulltime employees and provide a proof of concept for a national upskilling and reskilling program that will hopefully replicate the success of other talent attraction and development initiatives such as SkillsFuture in Singapore, TalentCorp in Malaysia, and the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) in India.
Getting Ahead of the Curve IBPAP is also working with the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) for other talent attraction and development initiatives that will complement the different components and delivery channels under the proposed national upskilling and reskilling program.
Data gathered through the survey will help realign private and public sector initiatives with the future job requirements of the Filipino workforce in response to the disruptive technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The initial report, which was submitted earlier this year, is already undergoing the validation process.
Pivoting to Higher-Value Work Although widespread digitalization had already been pushing the sector’s upskilling and reskilling agenda forward, the health crisis has become an additional impetus in ensuring that Philippine ITBPM’s current talent pool is able to pivot to highervalue services, especially as the country’s business and economic landscape is reshaped. According to global analysts, COVID-19 will drive clients to embrace more innovations that will allow less reliance on legacy infrastructures, upgrade operational efficiency, and improve overall customer experience. In fact, share of digital-focused services has already exceeded that of traditional services in 2019 due to increased demand for analytics, automation, and cloud. In this regard, IBPAP expects that 73% of the workforce or 1.15 Million full-time employees will have taken up mid- and high-skill jobs by 2022. To put this into context, only 54% of the workforce was capable of mid and high-value work in 2016.
After signing a Memorandum of Understanding last October 2019, IBPAP and TESDA are already making headway in this endeavor with the Workplace Skills and Satisfaction (WSS) Survey as one of the methodologies under the Skills Needs Anticipation (SNA) for the IT-BPM industry.
“The adoption of next generation technologies will inevitably overhaul the current state of work. However, the transformation will be centered around the redefinition and augmentation of human work rather than elimination,” said Frankie Antolin, IBPAP Executive Director for Talent Development.
“While the demand for our services continues to come in, it is imperative for the sector to remain agile amidst a changing IT-BPM landscape,” said Ayhee Campos, IBPAP Vice Chair. “Our focus at the moment is to keep partnering with the industry, academe, and government to drive curriculum enhancement and initiate a mindset pivot to ensure the Filipino workforce is ready to answer the growing and shifting needs of the global marketplace.”
“The argument should not be about whether technological disruption will create or remove jobs. It should be more about finding ways to help humans wield these new tools and one way to accomplish this is to enable the movement of the existing workforce up the value chain through upskilling, reskilling, and promoting lifelong learning.”
BREAKTHROUGHS 2020 - ISSUE NO.1
P H OTO BY : MI M I T HI A N O N U NS P L AS H
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alent is, without question, at the heart of the Philippines’ core value proposition and one of the main reasons why the IT and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) industry is the economic powerhouse it is today. Because on top of being creative, emotive, and service-oriented, Filipinos are also known all over the world as agile, collaborative, innovative, and resilient.
