Tuesday, August 14, 2007 Cebu needs ‘good’ IT workers By Malou M. Mozo Sun.Star Staff Reporter
CEBU’S lack of a pool of competitive information technology (IT) professionals, apart from immediate demand for office space, have mitigated the entry of more investors to the province in the last two years.
“This is what I tell the investors, Cebu’s workforce alone cannot give you what you want, you have to look at other provinces to increase your employees,” said Joel Mari Yu, Cebu Investment Promotions Center (CIPC) executive director.
Yu said Cebu’s economy may be showing positive trends with the display of confidence among IT investors by choosing to locate here but the ready-supply of Cebuano IT professionals have derailed expansion plans.
“Tawo ra gyud ang limiting factor, not infrastructure, not cost,” he added.
Should the province been able to provide 25,000 IT professionals annually, more IT-enabled companies would not have to wait years to expand their operations in the province, Yu said.
For those who have established offices here, maintaining a high quality of IT professionals to run the business would mean importing from neighboring provinces like Iloilo, Dumaguete City, Bohol, Bacolod City, Cagayan de Oro City and Davao, among others, he advised.
Earlier, Cebu Educational Development Foundation for IT (Cedf-it) executive director Bonifacio Belen said software companies in Cebu have targeted to employ 1,500 to 2,000 programmers, software engineers, network and database administrators, among others, this year.
However, a Cedf-it-initiated survey in 2005 revealed only about 900 professionals are being employed by companies.
Yu said the shortage of competent IT workers can be blamed on some schools that have become too focused on ensuring a high turnout of IT enrollees, but in effect, produced IT graduates who fail to qualify for jobs.
“Follow the standard of UP (University of the Philippines)-curriculum and discipline-wise. If you need to drop students because they are not doing well, then do so,” was Yu’s call to local universities and colleges offering IT courses.
Excellence
Early this year, the Computer Science (ComSci) program of UP Cebu, along with the Cebu Institute of Technology, was awarded by the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) as a Center of Excellence (COE) for IT Education in Central Visayas.
As a COE for IT education, Ched will provide the UP Cebu ComSci program with funding for its line of activities in the areas of instruction, research, extension, intense private sector involvement, and its role in supporting the development of IT by other institutions of higher learning and across other disciplines.
Belen previously mentioned that the local industry planned to have a 22-percent increase in manpower in the next two years but based on feedback, they could have easily hired more, but preferred to do so cautiously since they were not sure of the “employability” or quality of the graduates.
Thus, Yu reiterated the need for the private sector to generate more programs for academe-industry linkages.
“It must be industry-driven,” he said, adding that while he lauded the efforts provided for by Cedf-it, the organization is “still small and under-funded.”
Cedf-it launched this year its Bridge Course program providing scholarships for IT graduates and professionals to make them qualified for entry level positions in IT companies.
