DAVAO CITY, 5 April — To the tens of thousands of new college graduates in the Philippines, congratulations!
And welcome to this world of shrinking employment opportunities.
With the bleak prospect of finding jobs at home, a business industry leader predicted that many of these new graduates are bound to swell the numbers of the jobless and of Filipino migrant workers.
Donald Dee, president of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines (ECOP), also warned that a prevailing mismatch between the needs of the industry and the manufacturing sector and the skills gained by these graduates could lead to more Filipino professionals becoming underemployed.
He said more education graduates may end up working as domestic helpers, nurses working as secretaries or entertainers, and engineering graduates working as factory workers or food chain food crews and attendants.
“Although this problem has been identified for a long time, nothing substantial has been accomplished on the part of the educational institutions,” he said.
Most companies in the country are already saddled with retraining workers to adopt new technologies needed by the information age, he said.
Another reason why the economy cannot absorb those who join the labor force this year is that businesses are only starting to recover.
The problem of too few new jobs offered to new graduates is made more glaring in the light of a recent unemployment report made by Labor Secretary Patrica Sto. Tomas.
New graduates will have to compete with a total of 3.4 million people looking for jobs but who cannot find one.
The job now represents 11.4 percent of 32 million able-bodied Filipinos.
Part-timers and seasonal workers are counted at 6 million.
Dee suggested that job seekers should either apply at enterprises that are exporting their products like the electronics industry, machine parts exporters, furniture makers and other export oriented firms.
The other alternative, he said, is for the new professionals and technical school graduates to seek jobs abroad while the business sector retools and recovers and the administration puts in place the infrastructure and policy reforms that make doing business in the Philippines cheaper and easier.