Academe bridges gap between investors and skills suppliers

CEBU, Philippines - Although the issue of manpower scarcity is an unending problem for the fast moving Information, Technology and Communication (ICT) sector, the Cebu academe sector is hell-bent on minimizing the gap between industry players and skills suppliers.

Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedfit) president Gregg Gabison said that major colleges and universities in Cebu have already adopted their specialized expertise for ICT related courses in order to provide necessary skills for the growing ICT investors, specifically the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and emerging Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) sectors.

Gabison, who is also the dean for College of ICT at the University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJ-R), said that the academe sector is now finding their own niche of specialization in order to spread out the skills development among schools, to satisfy the growing needs of industry players in this particular field.

“We are touching base with certain dimension in the industry,” Gabison said.

USJ-R, for instance, is specializing in developing skills for mobile technology, the Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT) and University of the Philippines Cebu are focusing on the expertise on Natural Language Processing (NLP) while University of Cebu (UC) is specializing on networking and technical support.

In this way, the industry players will be able to identify which school or universities to partner with in terms of manpower needs, based on their specific skills requirement.

Cedfit, on the other hand, in support of the individual companies’ effort to partner with the universities or the academe sector, has introduced the “Bridging the Gap” program, wherein the organization will help industry players which university to work with in terms of skills development programs.

Gabison admitted that despite the extensive move of trying to bridge the gap between industry and the academe, which is the skills or manpower supplier, the “gap” issue is “never ending.”

He said technology is fast moving. In the past, universities have only developed courses for basic ICT. Now specialization is required, with constant update of technology development should be incorporated to their universities’ existing programs.

What is important though, he said is that the academe sector in Cebu is trying its best to trail blaze with the strong dynamism of technology development. Thus, Cebu still is expected to provide a good number of skilled manpower to the KPO sector.

The challenge however for the academe sector is to make sure that it produces what the industry is needing.

“Now, there’s a variety of requirements. Industries are now more on platform specific, and we have to catch up on this,” Gabison said.

The continuous challenge also of Cedfit, an organization composed of ICT players, academe, and related sectors, is to minimize the mismatch between the employers and the universities.

Cebu produces an average of two thousand to three thousand ICT graduates a year. Average growth hovered from seven to eight percent annually.

According to Gabison, with this move to forge closer relationship with the industry players and academe, and also with the specialization program adopted by the universities, Cebu’s ICT graduate employability rate stood at 75 percent.

Employers such as NCR, NEC, Lexmark, Exist, among others are the largest takers of these graduates, he said.

Gabison hopes that with the more active academe sector, and intensified programs being set up with Cedfit, employability rate for ICT graduates in Cebu will rise in the next few years. – (FREEMAN)