Developing a world-class workforce

"It’s going to be one world, one market, one consumer, where boundaries, citizenships, ideologies, economies and businesses will blur. How we live, how we relate with each other, how we buy, how we sell and how we make things will change," said STI Education Services Group chairman Felipe Alfonso.

"The 21st century global citizen or worker will have to keep up with this evolution of current times. He must be a citizen of the world because companies and brands are global. He must, therefore, be a global consumer," he said.

The Philippines currently has 6 million to 6.5 million.

"Unfortunately, the bulk of the Filipinos working overseas still work in the lower end of the value chain in human resources. At that level, other countries are beginning to realize they can also supply that. Our challenge, and one that STI takes to heart, is to ramp up our people to produce higher value knowledge workers," he said.

To meet the needs of the global market, STI has expanded beyond IT education and is now offering courses in healthcare, education and business. STI’s courses are IT-enhanced to meet both global and business process outsourcing demands.

The 21st century Pinoy professional

Using market intelligence from its placement agencies, STI can develop a new curriculum and quickly produce and deliver the courseware through its network of schools. This allows each student to receive the same kind of quality education from any STI school in the country.

"But we still have a lot to do. The new breed of professionals must not only be technically competent, multi-skilled and digitally-literate, they must also have a global mindset. This means they should be self-driven, confident, creative, responsible – personal and emotional competencies that cannot be taught by IT courses."

One of the STI mandates for this school year is to dramatically change the way general education is taught, focusing on personal and emotional skills.

"We are using the traditional standardized courseware approved by the Commission on Higher Education but we are enhancing these by using more relevant activities. We will teach these in the context of current events. In other words, we will try to bring reality into the classroom, and the classroom into reality. We refuse to allow what is traditionally a Socratic, ivory-towered curriculum to be the platform for these kids who, when they get out, might not have the mindset, the personal and emotional competencies that will make them succeed," said Alfonso.

"What we’re saying is, the technical functional skills – nursing, vocation, business, IT – are fine. But we can not partake of the higher value jobs if the Filipino graduates are still shy, still have an inferiority complex, their work ethic is still sloppy, all those things. We feel those issues should be tackled by an education system as well and that’s what we’re doing."

In an attempt to hurdle this challenge, STI will make use of technology to reduce the number of face-to-face interaction in basic delivery. This will allow professors to concentrate on teaching values such as provocation, critical thinking, problem solving, the nature of which necessitates the physical presence of a facilitator.

"To accomplish this, we have tied up with E-pass Technologies where we’ll try to converge as much content as we can to customize the delivery of the knowledge transfer part of education. What we will do is cover the content, convert analog content into digital content, store this in very low cost storage cards like plastic cards, and let students interact with this content through low cost single function devices like a reader, or what we call a poor man’s PDA."

If it is able to pull it off, STI will be less teacher- dependent. Consequently, it can now cull from the current supply of teachers only the best ones and let them handles the values education.