The Department of Labor and Employment projects some 4 million jobs created with more than 3 million new graduates joining the workforce between 2006 and 2010 within the fields of agribusiness, cyberservices, engineering, healthcare, tourism and hospitality.

While studies show that there are more new jobs than there are new graduates in the Philippines, finding the right number of qualified talents among the annual graduates, job seekers, and those already in active employment remains a challenge.  Fresh graduates and long-unemployed job seekers are met with difficulties in finding and landing jobs in the market.  Employers and its agents, on the other hand, are likewise met with the same kind of difficulties in finding the right talents to fill-in jobs needed to support business growth and competitiveness goals.

Some reasons for the lack of industry-qualified graduates and job-seekers to fill in vacancies are:  not enough trained supply, inability of the applicants to meet the required high standards of companies, lack of academic alignment with industry human resources requirements, and high exit rate of employees due to the absence of a clear career growth path.

The EITSC, in partnership with Hanns Seidel Foundation/Germany, through a project co-funded by the European Commission entitled "Establishment of Market-driven and Technology-based Courses and Further Training for the Information Technology (IT) Sector in the National Capital Region," is advocating the dualized training system or DTS as a viable solution to the skills mismatch between industry and academe and as a platform to address the human resource needs of Philippine companies providing outsourcing and offshoring services.

DTS is a training process that empowers a company to provide relevant content to a partner educational institution in order to equip students with a set of skills developed to suit the company's needs.  Students who have undergone dualized training exhibit good work attitude, superior communication skills, clear career direction, and enhanced decision-making capabilities.  DTS also benefits companies as they are presented with trained and skilled students upon graduation.

After holding several workshops on DTS, the Project has developed a competency standard, a competency-based curriculum, 53 DTS learning packages, and a competency assessment instrument for Contact Center Servicing.  These resources will be integrated in UMak's short-term and associate degree courses on contact center services.

The Philippines has already embraced today's fast-paced global economy.  To address the global demand for services, talent development is key. Industry and academe must join hands to combat the country's current human resource crisis on employment mismatch not because of the lack of opportunities but of the lack of available qualified talents.  Should this be unabated and with the exponential demand for services, unemployment will continue to rise and companies will find it difficult to expand and innovate according to global market demands.