MANILA -- The information technology and business process management sector is facing a job-skills mismatch, an industry leader said Friday.

"While we have almost 800,000 college graduates, there is a skills gap as well that has resulted in a job-skills mismatch," said IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) President and chief executive officer Jack Madrid.

Speaking on ANC's Market Edge, Madrid said the job requirements of the industry are becoming more demanding and diverse.

"It is no longer a one-dimensional customer service voice-based phone call, but…our industry has matured and diversified into a more diverse set of industry verticals that span from all kinds of financial services including insurance, " he said.

"We are now the second-biggest healthcare provider in the world, being the second-largest supplier of US-certified nurses, so even within healthcare, there’s health finance, there is care management, there is remote patient monitoring, there is pharmacovigilance, there are many many services, even within healthcare alone."

"Not to mention the creative industries such as game development and animation," he explained.

"Don’t think of the IT-BPM industry as simply answering repetitive phone calls. It has matured well beyond that. And so correspondingly the skills needed by our jobseekers and our university graduates will be more complex," he said.

Madrid said they are eyeing partnerships with government agencies like the Commission on Higher Education, Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, the Department of Education, and the Department of Information and Communications Technology to update the school curricula so that jobseekers can be ready to deliver in the IT-BPM sector.

He noted, however, that even employees already in the sector need to upskill themselves.

"We need to take it upon ourselves as individuals, as employees, as jobseekers as investors to take upskilling more seriously than we have in the past. It is no longer so much about the college degree that you earn, but more on the credentials and skills that you learn every 6 months. It’s gonna be that fast," he said.

"We need to be comfortable with being able to unlearn, learn and relearn and repeat that cycle throughout the rest of our career in order to remain relevant and be able to keep up with the very fast pace of technology."

--ANC, 20 September 2023

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