Innovation boot camp to help address job-skills mismatch

Luis Pineda, IBM Philippines country general manager (5th from left), and Angelique Roux, EDC Philippines country manager for AWARE project (4th from left), lead the discussion for the public and private sector tie-up on the Cebu Innovation Boot Camp project.
CDN PHOTO/VICTOR SILVA

In the next two years, more than 600 students from Cebu City’s public senior high schools will undergo a boot camp aimed at addressing the job-skills mismatch several local industries are seeing today.

The Cebu Innovation Boot Camp, the first installment of which will be launched this November, was made possible through the partnership between nonprofit organization Education Development Center (EDC) and multinational technology company IBM.

“The Cebu Innovation Boot Camp aims to promote the readiness of the youth for employment and to increase their competitiveness in the workplace by strongly demonstrating both their technical and work readiness skills,” IBM Philippines country general manager Luis Pineda said during a press conference on the sidelines of the IBM Innovation Forum at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel last week.

Pineda said this is in line with the company’s focus on disruptive technologies to accelerate innovation as well as IBM’s corporate social responsibility program focusing to strengthen the K-12 education in the Philippines.

IBM disclosed that three to five public senior high schools in Cebu City will benefit from the program, but they could not reveal which institutions these are while the list is still being finalized.

Aspiring Minds

According to a recent report by global firm Aspiring Minds, two out of three fresh Filipino graduates in the last two years were not ready with the necessary skills and training for the jobs that they wanted.

The study noted 16 percent of fresh graduates wanted to teach, followed by those who wanted to have administrative jobs (15 percent), and those who wanted to pursue business (12 percent).

The India-based Aspiring Minds helps companies and institutions measure employability. The study is based on an analysis of 60,000 new graduates from more than 80 colleges across the country in the past two years.

Necessary skills

While the study showed that ICT-related jobs did not fall within the top three preferred jobs of fresh Filipino graduates, IBM stressed the importance of having students equipped with skills necessary for the digital landscape.

Through this partnership, Pineda said that high school students will be made to solve real-world problems by developing applications using the IBM Bluemix cloud platform — a modular set of infrastructure services where they can scale on virtual servers and build micro-services with event-driven models.

Pineda said their training will include master classes to familiarize them first with the latest information technologies, ideation sessions to allow them to apply what they have learned, prototyping a model of their solution, and finally for them to pitch their solution to a panel of judges for evaluation.

Angelique Roux, EDC Philippines country manager for the Accelerating Work Achievement and Readiness for Employment (AWARE) project, said the innovation boot camp is the perfect set-up for the youth to hone their ICT literacy alongside other crucial competencies.

From 2014 to 2015, the nonprofit organization implemented AWARE in NCR and Cebu, working with tenth graders before the K-12 program was fully implemented.

Model of intervention

Roux said that their model of intervention to prepare the youth for the workplace had two components: life skills training and work immersion model, which would not only expose students to the workplace but also provide them meaningful and relevant work experience.

“After two school years, our data showed that the model works. We had some of the student absorbed by our industry partners at the age of 16 and 17. Some of them are still working part-time now,” she said.

Following the success of AWARE’s first run, she said members of the team came together to design a work-readiness model that would equip the youth to be better prepared on top of just soft skills and work immersion.

“We added the digital component. The youth of today face a different landscape at work. The digital economy demands that our youth be ready with a different set of literacies, competencies and qualities,” Roux said.

16 literacies

The World Economic Forum lists 16 of these literacies and competencies including foundational literacies, or how students apply core skills to everyday tasks, which include literacy, numeracy, scientific literacy, ICT literacy, financial literacy, and cultural and civic literacy.

Competencies or how students approach complex challenges include critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication, and collaboration.

Character qualities or how students approach their changing environment include curiosity, initiative, persistence or grit, adaptability, leadership, and social and cultural awareness.

“The innovation boot camp where students, in a matter of just two days, will be solving real-world problems is also an effective and efficient learning environment for them to build all these qualities,” said Roux.

EDC and IBM are also collaborating with the Metro Cebu Development and Coordinating Board, Department of Education, and the Department of Information and Communication Technology.

Boot camp, LEAP

Wilfredo “Jun” Sa-a Jr., managing director at Cebu IT-BPM Organization (CIB.O), said the boot camp will be a great help to Cebu City’s senior high school students.

“This can provide them with more employment skills in the high-value activities,” he said in an interview.

Sa-a added that the initiative also complements what the CIB.O is doing to help the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry address the lack of college graduates two years from now.

CIB.O recently partnered with the Cebu City government, through the office of City Councilor Joy Young, Cebu City Department of Education, and the Department of Information and Communication Technology for a program called Learning English Application for Pinoys (LEAP).

LEAP, a 40-hour self-paced training program, was introduced to 27 senior high schools in Cebu City in August last year to help improve the oral communication skills of SHS students to boost their employability in the BPO sector as well as other industries such as tourism and hospitality.