THE inability to process and analyze big data among fresh graduates has been pinpointed by company headhunters as one of the biggest problems in hiring new candidates.
While the corporate side has been generous enough to provide short courses for new recruits to speed up competence and compatibility in the company, life-long learning and the establishment of learning roadmaps must be in place to turn Filipinos into digital superstars excelling in the digital transformation sphere, speakers of the recent World Fintech Festival held in the Philippines said.
Sprout Solutions co-founder and product head Alexandria Gentry said apart from company-mandated training and self-initiated crash courses by newly minted workforce members, the government must also play an active role in revisiting and restructuring the academic curriculum.
"We have to change the curriculum to accelerate learning; it won't happen quickly. But we've seen that it is possible. We just have to take the first steps toward the right direction," she said.
ImpactHub's chief innovation officer Diego Jose Ramos noted that "there is a big gap in the reference between local and international standards. I've checked both education curricula. Even though programming courses start as early as the third year, the government must have a strong mandate to radically change the education system."
Michelle Rubio, UnionBank's executive vice president and chief human resource, on the other hand, gave a huge emphasis on the holistic learning of a company.
"It is important to tech up the generation prior to these groups because they also add significant value. What we're generally after is re-skilling across the organization so that we can transform as a company as fast as we can and be able to reap the rewards of digitization. After four years of doing this, our team members have digitally adopted and acquired agile skills," said Rubio.
Being equipped with technical skills is crucial to make Filipinos digitally competitive. Yet Rubio reiterated that human skills are the new normal era of 2021 nears.
"From the old to the young, there's essentially going to be a requirement for skill sets in the digital sphere. It's going to be an opportunity for them to learn a lot because this is the way to the future. However, let's not also lose our human skills: empathy, critical thinking, problem solving, and communication because these are just as important," she said.
3 agreements
The Philippines recently showcased its best financial technology (fintech) practices to an international audience virtually during the five-day World Fintech Festival (WFF) Philippines 2020. This year's WFF highlighted key executives and decision-makers from Asian nations as they discussed how they piloted fintech to produce societal impacts.
On the fifth day of the event, major fintech and business associations in the Philippines and from other countries signed three important agreements.
The first was a partnership among three Philippine industry associations that are heavily involved in technology: the Philippine Association for Digital Commerce and Decentralized Industries, the Distributed Ledger Technology Association of the Philippines and the Fintech Philippines Association.
The second signing was for a Philippine Industry Sandbox led by industry groups Fintech Philippines Association and Fintech Alliance with support from the financial sector and intellectual property program funded under the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office Prosperity Fund. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas plays an observer role in support of the Industry Sandbox.
The event also saw the launch of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) office of the Global Impact Fintech Forum, a global non-profit think tank with 1,000+ members from 40+ countries that helps find solutions to humanity's key challenges by leveraging disruptive tech and fintech. (KOC/With PR)