Thursday, August 12, 2004 Ng: IT supply, demand situation in Cebu By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
CEDF-IT. Cebu has been trying to transform itself into a major ICT (information and communications technology) software and e-services hub. Among the institutions that have been contributing to this vision in the last three years is the Cebu Educational Foundation for IT or Cedf-it.
Cedf-it has recognized human resource as a key area of intervention to realize this vision. Thus, it is focused on teacher training, curriculum standardization, and industry-academic-government linkage.
One of the things Cedf-it has engaged in, with the sponsorship of Usaid-Agile is a survey on the ICT human resource supply and demand potentials of Cebu.
There were four questions the survey was meant to address:
a) the supply—or how many graduates from major IT courses in Cebu, and how many are appropriately employed.
b) the demand—or how much the industry needs each year, as well as the quality of the human resource to be needed.
c) in case of a shortfall in quantity and quality, what interventions are needed to improve the situation, like career guidance, infrastructure development, certification or quality assurance in education.
d) its implications on Cebu’s vision.
Certain figures might be of interest to readers.
For instance, it was gathered that Cebu schools graduated 1,920 in bachelor’s courses on computer courses in 2002, 1,551 graduates in 2003 and 2,217 in 2004.
In addition, there were 628 graduates of associate degrees in 2002, 934 associates in 2003, and 1,278 associates in 2004.
Among the bachelor’s degrees, the biggest components in 2004 were computer science (742 graduates), computer engineering (605 graduates) and 721 information technology (721 graduates).
OVERSUPPLY. However, there were some interesting findings on the demand side.
Of the about 2,200 graduates in bachelor’s courses in 2004, only 100 to 300 (or approximately 4.5 to 14 percent) were appropriately employed as software developers, with industry recognition that that they needed little or no additional training. This means roughly 1,900 to 2,100 of the graduates were employed in other sectors or in other jobs.
Realistically, therefore, there is an oversupply of graduates. Based on feedback from industry, they could easily hire more, but prefer to do so cautiously since they are not sure of the “employability” or quality of the graduates.
Based on surveys, it was noted that local industry planned to have a 22 percent increase in manpower in the next four years if the quality of graduates suffices. Thus, the general intervention is really to look at how to redirect the oversupply of the current 2,000 graduates, plus increase the enrollment for Cebu to continue to grow in its IT vision.
With the appropriate intervention, it is possible for Cebu to graduate over 1,600 graduates that will be employable in software development, 1,300 graduates that can be hired by engineering design services, as well as another 13,000 graduates that can work in other e-services like call centers or business process outsourcing companies on year 2008.
If this can be done, after four years, Cebu could have a thriving e-services industry with total employment of 5,000 in software development, 4,000 in engineering design, and over 40,000 in other e-services.
For those getting excited, the seven IT skills in large demand by industry are network protocol and administration, SQL Database, .NET programming, multimedia creation, messaging solutions, HTML/ Web page creation, and visual basic programming.
(email: wilson@esprint.com.)
(August 12, 2004 issue) Write letter to the editor.Click here. Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
