JOB MISMATCH IN THE PHILIPPINES

 In 2018 more than 50,000 jobs in the Phil-JobNet website that could not
be filled because the knowledge and skills of job seekers did not match
the needs of the companies.
 As of last May 29, Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz reported 130,290
vacancies in that website, the government’s official jobs portal that
consolidates vacancy postings from various sources. Last January, a
record high of 268,278 job vacancies was posted, while the number of
registered worker-applicants was only less than half (116,795).
 Last Labor Day, the Department of Labor and Employment attracted a
total of 36,765 job applicants in job fairs held in various parts of the
country. Only 1,274 found immediate placement, with another 3,340
applicants told to undergo further interviews with employers. This
suggests that less than one out of 10 applicants manages to find a job
in DOLE’s job fairs. And yet Secretary Baldoz observes that just like in
the website, the number of jobs offered during job fairs normally
exceeds the number of applicants.
 One wonders why we have a persistent problem with high
unemployment and underemployment, and yet have so many jobs
persistently waiting to be filled. The usual answer is that we face a jobs-
skills mismatch wherein the training of our jobseekers simply does not
match the requirements of the companies looking for people to fill their
vacancies. This mismatch problem appears to span job categories
ranging from the relatively low skilled to highly specialized ones. It is
also a problem seen in both the private and public sectors.
 In many cases, the skills mismatch is very real. Philippine Business for
Education (PBEd), through its research partner Brain Trust Inc. (BTI),
interviewed various companies’ human resource officers as part of its
USAID-funded Higher Education for Productivity Project (HEPP). A large
industrial firm in Batangas needs dozens of engineers for its projected
expansion, but can’t find suitable recruits.
 We all know of the mad rush students made to nursing schools in past
years, and the equally mad rush of certain colleges and universities to
 offer nursing courses to meet the demand. It didn’t take long to reach a
glut of nursing graduates; now they are the ones actually paying to be
able to work in hospitals for needed work experience. Otherwise they
end up working in call centers or totally unrelated jobs, putting their
highly specialized training to naught.
 But the perceived technical skills mismatch appears illusory in other
contexts. I’ve heard a number of human resource officers say that what
they are looking for, but have difficulty finding in their applicants, are
not so much technical skills (such as those obtained in science,
engineering and technology courses) but more of “soft” ones:
communication and presentation skills, analytical ability,
resourcefulness, creativity, motivation, ability to work in a team,
honesty and the like.
 Many employers only look for any college degree, and for as long as
applicants possess the desired “soft” skills, they will take care of the
rest. Here, the mismatch is not in technical training, but in something
more fundamental.
 The problem is that what seems to be in demand now may no longer be
so four to five years later when they graduate and look for jobs.
Furthermore, perceptions on what is “in demand” could be misplaced
and prone to “herd mentality” and fickle swings in the market.
Meanwhile, most schools also tend to base their choice of course
offerings on what they see students and parents want, thereby
reinforcing the possible error in perception of job market demands.
 In the ideal world, schools—be they universities, colleges or
technical/vocational training institutions—would be in regular contact
and close coordination with the potential employers of their graduates,
well-guided on the nature and content of their course offerings in order
to be most responsive to the needs of the firms. The most common way
this contact currently happens is through on-the-job training (OJT)
programs that college seniors must go through. But we’ve encountered
firms that don’t take OJTs seriously, even seeing them as a burden,
supervision costs and all. There is great scope for strengthening
linkages between industry and academe to foster more relevant course
and curriculum design, university-based research agenda, faculty
enrichment through industrial immersion, scholarship programs, and
other modes for helping the schools address the persistent job-skills
mismatch.