It is possibly a universal phenomenon that young people who are college bound, together with their parents, generally aim for a college degree over technical qualifications that may be acquired through technical vocational education and training. This may generally be based on the traditional “higher” social status attached to a “good” education, evidenced by a college diploma or a university degree over technical qualifications which are usually accorded “lower” status.
While there may not be any intrinsic issue attached to such socio-cultural orientation, it is a considered fact that in the Philippines, the incidence of “educated unemployment”, especially among those with college education and those who have acquired a bachelor’s degree, is relatively high. Inevitably, such a situation is often regarded as a clear manifestation of supply and demand mismatches in the labor market.
Those who finish college are commonly regarded as “graduates” as soon as they are able to complete a structured program of study consisting of general education and specialized subjects which are assigned units and credits. When a student is able to obtain a passing mark in all his subjects, he or she is assessed as having completed his or her course and therefore considered a graduate, regardless of the possibility that he or she may not really have acquired skills or competencies that render him or her employable.
Such a situation may be attributed to the fact that higher education programs were generally not designed on the basis of skills and competencies defined by industry sectors which may be expected to employ graduates from such programs. Competency standards similar to those which are applied to technical qualifications as defined by industry are, by and large, still not evident in many of the professions which are the subject of higher education programs.
It is therefore not uncommon for bachelor’s degree graduates to find themselves as “square pegs” who do not fit in “round holes” as they start joining the labor force and begin their search for a “suitable” job.
There are, of course, some fresh winds of change in the horizon, like in the area of hotel and restaurant management. For one, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority or TESDA has drawn up a set of qualification standards based on the inputs of industry experts and practitioners. Such standards have been drawn up together with assessment tools and procedures that are used to surface measurable evidence of the acquisition of skills and competencies for various jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry.
Such qualification standards have been adopted by a few higher education institutions offering a degree in hotel and restaurant management, as in the case of one well-known university. Back in the days, the university’s ladderized degree program in hotel and restaurant management integrates TESDA’s qualification standards with the Commission on Higher Education’s (CHED) general education subjects, allowing students in the program to earn not only vocational qualifications but also a full bachelor’s degree. Graduates of the university’s ladderized program are generally considered employable since they not only possess the technical qualifications for various jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry but also the required general education orientation in the arts, sciences and culture.
Training programs designed to produce graduates that meet qualification requirements for various jobs in the industry are accredited by TESDA on the basis of training regulations or training standards which are also defined by industry experts. Graduates of such skills training programs who go through and pass competency assessment undertaken by accredited competency assessors have better chances of landing jobs for which they have been trained.
When a skills training program is designed on the basis of competency and training standards defined by industry and graduates of such program are assessed on the basis of the same set of competency standards, there is a large margin of certainty that graduates become employable when they are able to demonstrate the competencies which are required of specific jobs in the labor market.
Unfortunately, the same cannot readily be said of most higher education programs which normally require longer gestation periods before graduates are produced. Given the rapid pace of technological change in certain industry sectors, higher education programs which intend to address the manpower needs of such sectors may often lag behind, in terms of course structure and content.
Ladderized degree programs, such as the hotel and restaurant program offered by the university referred to above, render concerns about long gestation periods of bachelor’s degree programs insignificant since at any given point a student may opt to leave the program as soon as he or she has acquired the required skills and competencies for a particular job in the industry. Such early departure from the program is inconsequential since the student may re-enter the program at some future time to acquire more job qualifications including the full degree itself.
A bachelor’s degree program that combines vocational qualifications promulgated by TESDA and academic qualifications based on CHED’s prescriptions may be the best antidote for the age-old social bias against tech-voc courses. It may also provide a viable answer to the perennial concern over jobs and skills mismatch in the labor market.
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