The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) is seeking to ease the labor shortage in the agriculture sector through its new internship program with the Department of Agriculture (DA).
Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III said the arrangement will allow the agency to deploy technical and agricultural biosystems engineers and graduates to DA’s offices under their Government Internship Program (GIP).
Labor Assistant Secretary Dominique Tutay said the DOLE launched the program upon the recommendation of the Board of Agricultural Engineers to give new graduates “relevant skills and work experience particularly in mechanizing agriculture.”
“The DA will provide such an opportunity for these graduates, while DOLE will be paying their stipend for the duration of the program,” Tutay told the BusinessMirror via Viber. “In the process, we will bridge the skills gap in modernizing our agriculture sector.”
DA has requested to have 500 interns, but Tutay said the initial implementation of the program will cover only100 individuals.
Job opportunity
Beneficiaries of the program will be given an internship, which may last between three to six months, in various government projects and offices in the country.
During the period the interns will be given a stipend equivalent to the existing minimum wage of the region where they are employed and insurance coverage.
She also said the program can benefit DA since it will give them the opportunity to hire their top performing GIP beneficiaries.
“There are interns who are absorbed by the government while some find opportunities in the private sector,” Tutay said.
DOLE’s Bureau of Local Employment (BLE) said 711 Agricultural and Biosystems Engineers who passed the licensure examination and more or less 1,000 new agricultural and biosystems engineering graduates may benefit from the program.
Hard-to-fill positions
In its JobsFit Labor Market Information Report 2022, BLE classified Agricultural Economist, Animal Husbandry, Aquaculturist, and several others in the field of agricultural and biosystems engineering as “in-demand but hard-to-fill positions.”
In-demand occupations refer to job vacancies posted recurrently by establishments and industries and have high turnover or replacement rate.
Meanwhile, hard-to-fill positions refer to job vacancies that the company is having difficulty filling because applicants are not qualified or there is a lack of applicants.
Bello said they opted to focus their GIP on the agriculture sector since many of the country’s poor continue to depend on it.
“Three quarters of the poor are found in the rural areas and agriculture employs most of the poor, which means agriculture plays a key role in efficiently reducing poverty,” Bello said.
“From the labor and employment perspective, the development of the rural sector is crucial first step for the country to provide more and better jobs for the poor,” he added.