Job hunting won’t be easy for new graduates

This is sad news to 800,000 young men and women who got their high school and college diplomas in the last week of March. There simply are too few jobs up for grabs.

The problem is quite serious, admits Donald Dee, president of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines (ECOP), in an interview with the Philexport News & Features.

For one, there is a big mismatch between the needs of industry and the manufacturing sector and the skills gained by the graduates. Although this problem has been known for a long time, nothing substantial has been accomplished on the part of the educational institutions, Dee points out.

The mismatch often takes the form of teaching graduates ending up as domestic helpers and nurses working as secretaries and entertainers.

Already saddled with retraining their workers to adopt to new technologies needed by the information age, employers will have to spend for the training of new recruits for the latter to adopt to their jobs.

Another reason why the economy cannot absorb those who join the labor force this year is that businesses are only starting to recover. Many factories are still operating below their full capacity as consumer demand remains flat, the business leader says.

"The problem is quite serious. Industry and manufacturing used to absorb up to one fourth of new graduates. The sector’s absorptive capacity has gone down below 20 percent. The only bright spot in the economy is the export industry which has consistently grown in almost a decade while the rest of the economy stagnated," Dee adds.

The third factor behind the failure of the economy to absorb a big part of the jobless is the big gap between labor rates and productivity. The annual report on the competitiveness of nations made by the World Economic forum at the end of 1999 found the Philippines with the singular distinction of paying those with jobs much higher salaries than their firms’ ability to produce goods or services.

The Global Competitiveness Report says the work force in the Philippines – from janitors and drivers to top-level managers – are getting paid much higher than most other countries, when renumeration is measured against per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced in a given country each year, while per-capita GDP is often used as a rough measure of a nation’s productivity.

The problem of too few jobs offered to new graduates is made more glaring in the light of a recent unemployment report made by Labor and Employment Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas as of last January. They will have to compete with a total of 3.4 million people looking for jobs but who can not find one. The jobless now represents 11.4 percent of all able-bodied Filipinos. That is not to include over six million people who only have part time jobs or are seasonally employed.

Dee suggests that job seekers should apply to enterprises that are exporting their products like the electronics industry, garments industry, machine parts exporters, furniture makers and other export-oriented firms.

The other alternative, he says, is for the new professionals and technical school graduates to seek for jobs abroad while the business sector retools and recovers and the administration puts in place the infrastructure and policy reforms that make doing business in the Philippines easier and cheaper. – Abe P. Belena, Philexport News & Features.