PATHWAYS TO PROFESSIONS

PATHWAYS TO PROFESSIONS

Dear Mr. President: Perhaps the problem of the so-called “mismatch” in the job market has already come to your attention? According to the statistics, every year, there are thousands of college graduates who could not find jobs, while there are supposedly thousands of jobs that could not be filled, because the qualifications of the job applicants supposedly do not meet the requirements of the prospective employers.

I know that there could be many possible solutions to the said problem, but may I present to you one solution that could possibly work? For lack of a better term, I am temporarily calling it “Pathways to Professions” (P2P). This is not a new idea, because as far as I know, there are already some countries that are already doing it. What is new however, is that very recently, artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to match the profiles of the prospective employees with the “wish lists” of the prospective employees, hence removing or avoiding the mismatch problem.

Again, for lack of a better term, it could be said that the prospective hires are already “spoken for” by the prospective employers, as if they are already “betrothed”, to liken it to a wedding engagement. In a manner of speaking, the “betrothed” person is already technically an employee of the company because of the “engagement”, like the way that a cadet of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) is already technically an officer of the armed forces even if he or she is still studying.

From an overall perspective, it is cheaper for the employers to adopt this approach, because it will save them money from the high costs of recruitment. Aside from that, it will save them money from the high costs of attrition, due to high employee turnovers caused by too many new hires that are not the perfect fits for the job openings. In these cases, it is not only the employers who suffer, but also the employees, because they must look for new jobs again, once they resign or if they are fired from their jobs.

Based on my own experience, it is a good practice to invite graduating students to genuine “On the Job” (OJT) training programs. What I mean by “genuine” is that it really must be a real OJT program where the student gains by gaining new knowledge. What I mean by “fake” are those haphazard assignments where students are just asked to make coffee and make photocopies. I have supervised many OJT programs myself, that is why I know what I am talking about.

What happens in a genuine OJT program is the employers will get a chance to discover who the good candidates are, and they will also be able to measure and validate their skills. On the other hand, the students will also be able to get an inside view of who the better employers are. This could be a two-way street, because it could become a “seller’s market” if the prospective employee is a prized catch.

Mr. President, with your help, you could convince the employers in both the private sector and the government to implement this idea of using AI to solve the problem of job mismatch. For this idea to really work, they should provide an allowance to the OJT participants, at least to cover their transportation and meal expenses. Sad to say, there are some companies that are not giving anything to their OJT participants, and some companies are even charging the students, for them to be accepted into the OJT programs. IKE SENERES/09-26-2024

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