Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Chickens create eggs and eggs create chickens, so if you cannot have both at the same time, which one is the best to start with? This is almost the same with job skills and job creation. We hear much about the fact that we need to have a more highly trained and skilled work force in order to create more high-paying quality jobs.
But is that necessarily true?
If we look at the increasing exodus of Filipino overseas workers in the last decade, we find that many skilled workers went abroad to find employment. This was not the kind of diaspora that saw educated teachers go to Hong Kong to work as domestic help and caregivers for more money. It was a more troubling drain of people trained as engineers, computer specialists and nurses—all highly skilled—that could not find suitable employment in the Philippines.
They had the skills, but the jobs were not available.
Conversely, when the outsourcing business started to grow in the Philippines, there were not enough skilled and qualified employees. People tend to think of outsourcing only as a call-center agent answering a simple question in English about why a cell-phone bill is too high, but that is not accurate. Our outsourcing sector now includes online technical services, medical transcription, high-level financial services, and skilled web-site development and maintenance.
When these companies first opened in the country, they had some difficulty finding qualified employees. But as the free market works even for employment, people started learning the skills needed to qualify for the job.
Several times in the last 15 years, call -enter companies have worried about running out of qualified English-speaking Filipinos to fill the positions. But every time, a year or so later, good-quality English speakers showed up to apply and fill up the job openings. These people saw good job opportunities, and they found ways to improve their skills or acquire new ones, either through special courses or individual effort.
High-level education is critically important, and any government or private-sector program that keeps young people learning and in school is crucial and must be increased. Advanced training programs are also vital and should be encouraged in every way. But to say that our major employment problem is the absence of enough skilled workers is naïve. This is a ridiculous example, of course, but assume that we took 100 students and trained them to be brain surgeons. Would that mean that suddenly Johns Hopkins University or the Mayo Clinic would say, “Wow, look at all those Filipino brain surgeons. Let’s open a hospital”?
In truth, you need both chickens and eggs to create a poultry farm. The same goes for skills and employment. Start by slowly convincing companies that need particularly skilled employees to set up shop here while, at the same time, pushing for advanced education in the skill fields that the companies need. It worked for the outsourcing sector, and it can work for other industries, as well.
