FRESH from our last Barangay Job Fair last Thursday at Barangay Mabiga, we at Peso Mabalacat were hopeful that a considerable number of our citymates would get their chances of landing jobs locally.
Improving the employment rate is one of the national government's goals, as is the thrust of the new Mabalacat City which counts the Clark Freeport Zone as one of its deep sources of employment opportunities.
Asked about the city's employment rate, I volunteered it was 15% and growing. A cursory look at the employment statistics at Clark Development Corporation would justify my claim.
In comparison, the country's reported unemployment rate in January 2013 stood at 7.1 percent, improving slightly from the 7.2 percent registered in the same month last year, as reported by the National Statistics Office or NSO.
Culling from the NSO's Labor Force Survey report for January, it can be gleaned that among the unemployed, 63.6 percent were males, with ages from 15 to 24. The bulk of the unemployed, per survey, were mainly high school graduates (33.7 percent), college graduates (16.9 percent) and college undergraduates (13.1 percent).
This year's graduates will definitely swell the ranks of the unemployed and thousands of job seekers. It is timely that these make plans to take up technical and vocational courses during the summer break.
In the meanwhile, Tesda, Peso and the City Social Welfare and Development of Mabalacat City, have been jointly sponsoring short-term courses in Hair Care, Electronics, Auto Servicing and lately, Tailoring.
On a bigger scale, some ten individuals are training in the Slaughtering course at Global Experts School of Science and Technology, for possible deployment to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. This is being coordinated by Peso Mabalacat.
--oo0oo--
By this time, many schools have facilitated the graduation of their seniors and the commencement speakers are expected to challenge them to become leaders of the country. I might as well share with you excerpts of the graduation speech I prepared:
The Department of Education or DepEd is one agency of the national government which has a program of exploring ways to come up with updated modules and trending innovations to keep up with the needs of the present and insight into the future requirements of Education in the country. Other departments in the government are also in constant evolutionary status to work for ways to keep up with the times, so to speak, in order to achieve the top common goal of excellence and fulfillment.
We are aware that laws have been passed to introduce changes in the education curriculum to make it relevant, effective and, yes, updated. The new innovation, which goes by its catchy nomenclature, K + 12 envisions a curriculum that, while basic in its focus to instruct and train graders on relevant subject and learning areas, strives to go notches higher in modes of instruction which aims to be at par with, it not better than, international standards.
To be competitive by world standards, the quality of Philippine education should be of top form and substance. This objective is what K + 12 and other innovations aim to comply with and be in synch with the national overall objective and purpose of having better leaders out of its present school population.
--oo0oo--
March 29 is the official campaign period for local elective position aspirants but already the landscape is profuse with campaign materials, each one proclaiming the candidate's good traits. More will be coming in the next few weeks before the E Day. Surveys abound, caucuses too. Whoever has the abundant logistics may come on top, the poor ones will be left with the proverbial empty bag.