Cedfit needs P25M budget to develop Cebu’s IT pool

The Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedfit) will need at least P25 million budget in order to fully develop the IT manpower skills in Cebu province.

"Our problem is skill-ability, the demand is strong, yet the [manpower] improvement is very slow," said Cedfit managing director Bonifacio Belen.

In order to improve the skill-ability of Cebu’s IT industry, the educational system for IT, needs at least P25 million to develop the potential skills for Cebu in the next two years.

At present, Belen said Cedfit has very limited budget to train the teachers in about 280 major IT schools, not only in Cebu province, but including IT colleges and universities in neighboring provinces such as Bohol, as well as Leyte.

Cedfit is a group composed of government and private institution players whose primary aim is develop the IT human resource in Cebu.

Training teachers for broader IT knowledge is very difficult, "we have to let them [teachers] stop temporarily in order to take the extensive training. We only have limited teachers and limited budget also," Belen said.

With the on-hand capability of Cedfit, which capacity largely depends on donations from member companies, and sponsors from international funding agencies such as Canadian government’s CIDA-Pearl 2 program, the foundation can only manage to improve IT skills by 10 percent every two years.

This is not supposedly the ideal rate for improvement, as Cebu is competing against other IT investment hubs all over the world, like India. But, Belen said Cedfit’s capability is only limited to private sectors’ support.

In Cebu alone, there are about 2,200 graduates of IT courses every year, only 14 percent of which are qualified for immediate employment, the rest needs more training, he said.

Thus, the focus now is to train the trainers for IT courses all over the province, and this is an expensive attempt.

Nevertheless, with Cedfit’s continuous program to improve the IT skills in Cebu, the quality of graduates has improved slightly.

For two years, CIDA-Pearl had extended support to Cedfit through providing certification for IT professionals in the field of Java programming, C++, Visual Basic, Network Engineering, and Computer Aided Design (CAD) skills. However, this program has to be sustained through an introduction of a real certification center to be run by professionals.

With the help of other international sponsors, Cedfit was able to establish the Phil. IT-GCE or Philippine IT General Certification Exam (Phil. IT-GCE), which serves as an interim solution for the need for a board examination, testing the IT skills of Filipino would-be professionals, with IT skills set by Filipino IT professionals, yet addressing international industry benchmarks.

The Phil-IT GCE was developed by CEDFIT in collaboration with www.itpros.ph, the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP), and the European IT Service Center Foundation (EITSC).

In the first two exams held last year, out of 150 who took the exam only 43 percent passed, mostly are graduating students from six participating universities here, namely; University of San Carlos, University of San Jose-Recoletos, University of Cebu, Cebu Institute of Technology, University of the Visayas, and University of Southern Philippines.