Todo kayod TESDA! Joey Salceda: 20M workers need tech voc training

By Billy Begas

House Committee on Ways and Means chairperson and Albay Rep. Joey Salceda saw the need for the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to expand its role in job creation and recovery and upskill some 20 million workers in the next two years.

Salceda made the statement after President Rodrigo Duterte signed Executive Order 140 creating the National Employment Recovery Strategy (NERS) Task Force.

In the NERS 8-point plan, TESDA’s primary role will be to train, retool, and upskill 407,804 workers, Salceda said.

Salceda underscored the need to create a critical mass of workers ready for and attractive to new investments.

“The employed labor force is around 43.3 million. My estimate is we need to train and upskill around a third of these workers, and all our unemployed workers, to make a meaningful difference,” Salceda said. “That’s already 18.5 million. We also need to have ready internships and training programs for the other 0.8 million or so graduates of college every year.”

He estimates that the country will need to train at least 20 million workers in the next two years “to make a real splash”.

“This ambitious strategy has three major components: technical vocational education in formal schooling, both high school and college. Second, we need a more diverse set of skill offerings from TESDA, including higher-order skills such as data analytics, 3D-modelling, and the rest. Third, we need to map out the skills that industries of the future need, the skills that we already have, and the skills that we still lack. This is the Singapore strategy of job protection, to keep their workers ready for any change in industries,” Salceda pointed out.

Salceda is pushing to upgrade TESDA into a department to “adapt to the changing environments towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution”

“We don’t need diplomas. We need skills. Much of our education spending is in churning out new graduates with very little job-relevant training,” he noted.

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Source: Latest Politics News Today (Politics.com.ph)