Friday, April 11, 2008 100T jobs available By Debra Magallon-Estero Sun.Star Correspondent
A Cebu-based foundation revealed that Cebu will need close to 100,000 people to fill in vacancies in the information technology (IT) sector, as well as in other IT-enabled services, by the year 2010.
Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedfit), said that this projection is just 10 percent of the nationwide requirement forecasted by the Business Process Association of the Philippines (BPAP).
Belen explained that in the global setting, IT and IT-enabled services are expected to earn $450 billion in revenues, $130 billion of which are from specific industries that the Philippines has capabilities in. These industries include the business process outsourcing sector, transcriptioning, software development, engineering design and back-office management.
“We’re a far-away second to India, which aims to get 60 percent of the total global revenues,” he said.
BPAP projected that in 2010, there will be a need for 75,000 software developers and 950,000 workers in the BPO industry nationwide.
“Cebu wants to get at least 10 percent of that number,” Belen said.
Shortage
At present, there are 5,000 software developers in Cebu while the BPO industry in the province has 22,000 workers.
To match BPAP’s forecast, Belen said that the number of software developers in Cebu has to grow by 200 percent while the number of BPO workers has to double in the next two years.
He also confirmed that this demand is much greater than Cebu’s labor supply.
Cebu and other provinces in Central Visayas only produce about 2,200 graduates yearly. Belen said only 30 percent of the total number of graduates in the region would qualify for an entry level position in software development companies.
As part of Cedfit’s effort to address this concern, the foundation is hosting today the fourth Philippine IT General Certification exam for 100 graduates from Mindanao.
The exam was put together by representatives from the industry and the academe to establish a pool of graduates that companies can screen for competency. The certification exam is also meant to push schools into improving their curriculum.
The foundation has also partnered with local colleges and universities in the region to extend training to faculty members.
But despite the efforts of the foundation to address the labor shortage, Belen feels that Cedfit has not been able to solve the problem.
“Although we have three percent improvement (of the situation) and that is better than zero,” he said.
Another challenge that Belen raised was the lack of “knowledge workers” in the industry. Most software developers who can be considered as project leaders are “all over the world,” he noted.
“(But) the local industry is attracting them back,” Belen said, adding that it would be a challenge to the industry to offer salary rates at par with what foreign companies abroad are giving.
