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LOCAL
employers are finding it hard to recruit qualified
people to fill in vacancies in health, aviation,
construction, technical services, human resources and
education industries, a survey by the labor department
showed.
The
nationwide study, conducted by the Bureau of Labor and
Employment Statistics (BLES) in 2006, covered a total of
7,630 companies to identify problems in local
recruitment.
One in
four establishments reported some difficulties in
recruiting qualified applicants to fill in certain
vacancies in the past three years. The surveyed
companies warned that this problem would persist.
Employers said the top five hard-to-fill occupations are
those for accountants and auditors, computer
professionals, commercial and technical sales
representatives, mechanical engineers and professional
nurses.
The BLES
middle-of-the-decade study, called Integrated Survey of
Establishments (BITS), define hard-to-fill occupations
as those that “have presented employers with the
greatest recruitment difficulties.”
Employers also reported to have struggled for more than
a year in recruiting qualified people to fill in
positions requiring 20 or more workers such as
air-traffic controllers; aircraft pilots; navigators and
flight engineers; personnel and human-resource
development officers; geologists and geophysicists;
pharmacists; industrial-robot controllers; decorators
and commercial designers; bacteriologists,
pharmacologists, pathologists and related workers;
technical and vocational instructors-trainors; safety,
health, and quality inspectors (vehicles, processes and
products); architects, photographers and image and
sound-recording equipment operators and science and
mathematics teachers.
To solve
the jobs-skill mismatch, surveyed companies proposed
salient program interventions such as an improvement in
the quality of education, skills training, strengthening
of jobs fairs and labor market information, regulation
of overseas deployment on selected categories, a review
of labor laws, and sound macroeconomic management.
For
three years since 2005, jobs fairs conducted in the
country’s 16 regions rose from 697 to 904 last year,
according to BLES.
In 2007
a total of 462,174 applicants joined the jobs fair held
nationwide.
Meanwhile, licensed overseas recruiters urged the
administration to invest in the skills training of
migrant workers instead of giving dole outs to the poor.
Jackson
Gan, vice president of the Federated Association of
Manpower Exporters Inc., said the government should use
between P1 billion to P2 billion from value-added tax
(VAT) revenues to implement a massive skills-training
program for migrant workers.
Gan said
the
Philippines
should take advantage of an increasing global demand for
professional and highly skilled workers by putting up
more training centers and increase the presence of
technical-vocational schools in the countryside.
“Funds
from the VAT intake should also fuel the job training
program for our overseas contract workers who are
responsible for $15 billion remittances in 2007 and [the
source of] 15 percent of the national income of the
government,” Gan said.
He
mentioned the Middle East which is undergoing a
trillion-dollar construction boom for the next five
years and whose demand for skilled workers are straining
the capacity of Philippine recruiters to provide the
hundreds of thousands of workers needed. |
