Thursday, October 19, 2006 Ng: ICT education in Cebu By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
Last week, I went to drop by the Cebu Investment Promotions Center (CIPC) upon the invitation of managing director Joel Mari Yu. We have just returned from a CIPC-led three-week information and communication technology (ICT) mission which took us to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, New York and Vancouver in promoting the potentials of Cebu.
There was a meeting with Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedf-it) executive director Bonifacio Belen and CIPC chairman Geronimo Sta. Ana on how to further the ICT industry of Cebu.
The truth of the matter is that Cebu, or the Philippines in general, could grow faster if only its work force have the necessary skills. But there is a shortage of highly skilled ICT workers, and this hampers the industry somewhat.
If we want Cebu to grow, the main focus should be skills. There will be complaints about power, Internet connectivity, and lack of infrastructure and water, among others, but at the end of the day, the world is beating a path to India’s door simply because it has the people who have the skills.
One of the concerns was about the quality of ICT graduates. I remember Boni Belen said that of the few thousand Cebu graduates every year in technology related courses, only a few hundred end up being employed as technology workers.
I agree that there is a need to improve quantity, but I also believe that it should also be coupled with quality.
The first step is to encourage more people to go for ICT and engineering courses. This was the hottest course during 1990s, I believe. But in the last few years, this has been superseded by nursing.
Why is nursing so popular? It is the choice of many because of predictability. You go to nursing school, get a degree, go to a review center, pass the certified exams, and voila — you get a dollar-paying job overseas.
What is not so attractive about ICT is that there are probably thousands of parents who heard about it and enroll their kids in computer courses. But they later find out that the school their children had gone to is no good and their kids end up getting blue collar jobs after graduation.
If only we can police the ranks and implement a certification exam (much like nursing) and guarantee passers jobs that are high paying, overseas employment or both. I’m sure more parents will invest in having their kids take the course and pass that exam.
But the reason many people are not taking the plunge — despite people like me who periodically say that ICT is probably the most promising course to take — is because they have heard a lot of disappointments and broken dreams as somewhere along the way, there was a disconnect between the quality that the industry wanted and what the schools and students were willing to provide.
