DTI urges employers to upskill workers

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is encouraging employers to upskill their workers in a bid to make them future-ready.

“We encourage employers to upskill workers. But we also recognize aligning systems of learning as equally important. With around 790,000 Filipino graduates annually, companies should find it promising to readily recruit smart, young, and productive workforce for their manufacturing operations,” Trade Secretary Alfredo Pascual said at the launch of the Advanced

Man-ufacturing Workforce Development Alliance (AMDev) Program supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“Crucial to manufacturing development is advancing our workforce pipeline, so we fully support and will continue to support AmDev. Preparing our workforce for the future is essential as it is one of DTI’s strategic priorities,” Pascual said.

The AMDev Program is a five-year (2022-2027) public-private partnership supported by USAID and implemented by Unilab Foundation (ULF). It seeks to develop a highly skilled and adaptive workforce pipeline that meets the evolving requirements of the advanced manufacturing sector through better-defined, harmonized skills and qualifications descriptors, com-petency, and training standards.

The main goal of the program is to improve the capacity of the education system to develop human capital aligned with the requirements of Industry 4.0.

To deliver this goal, the program will seek to achieve three Intermediate Results (IRs) such as: Improved competencies of target manufacturing workforce that are relevant to Industry 4.0 needs; Improved enabling environment for advanced manufacturing workforce development; and Improved stakeholder readiness for Industry 4.0.

Further, one of the key activities of AMDev is the establishment of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AMI) that will be operationalized by Alliance Core Partners, namely Amherst

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Meanwhile, among its government partners are the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), Department of Finance (DOF), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Department of

Science and Technology (DOST), and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).

“Initiatives such as AMDev are vital to the DTI’s work of tapping and leveraging the immense potential of the Philippines as a manufacturing hub.Through AMDev, the Filipino workforce will have the opportunity to learn new skills and knowledge that will further strengthen the competencies of the country’s manufacturing sector,” the DTI said.

It pointed out that various initiatives that coincide with AMDev are aligned with the national government’s work of responding to the learning needs and realities of the country’s work-force, especially in manufacturing.

The DTI emphasized that it endeavors to implement an industrialization strategy driven by science, technology, and innovation.