THE common complaint by companies hiring people for technology or technology-enabled work is that college graduates do not meet the requirements.

Job fairs attract hundreds or even thousands of applicants but organizers would be lucky to have 10 percent of their vacancies filled after the hours of interviews and screenings.

The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry complained that only a few graduates meet the qualifications needed for the job. The Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) told the House of Representatives oversight committee last week that only seven out of every 100 applicants are qualified to work for BPOs.

This industry includes call centers, medical transcription companies and back office services. CICT Commissioner Monchito Ibrahim told the House body there is a mismatch between skills the graduates got in school and the requirements of the industry.

For some call center companies, they even give more training to college graduates before taking them in.

In the clamor for a better-quality college education, those looking for models need not look very far.

In Talamban, Cebu city, they have only to raise their eyes, towards the mountains and the sky, to see the edifice of the Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (Cite).

The Cite presented last June 29 its latest batch of scholars of its three-year training in technical skills and entrepreneurship, values formation, and social services. The scholars are less privileged youth coming from families mostly in the Visayas.

Also during the event, guest speaker Enrique P. Esteban of the University of Asia and the Pacific told the scholars to focus on specific technical courses. He said most critics of the Philippine educational system point to a “serious gap” between the supply of educational institutions and the need of the country to prepare men and women to work in manufacturing enterprise.

The kind of specialized courses offered by Cite to deserving youth in the low-income group is an education model that aims to close that very gap, to correct the job-skills mismatch.

Under the Cite model, students spend half of the three years in school and the other half as trainees in companies where they learn to do the actual work.

The program includes daily masses to help in values formation, regular meetings with parents and guardians and commitments to the local community and to industry. Students develop a high sense of professionalism and a deep Christian and social-oriented spirit, Cite officials said.

Those who subsidize the students’ education are individual benefactors, social groups, government and non-government agencies and companies that provide cash, training and guidance.

While critics point to the poor quality of college education in the country, here is one institution that grants the kind of knowledge needed by deserving youth to prepare them for future jobs and future roles in society.

(ninicab@sunstar.com.ph)