MANILA: President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. emphasised the importance of implementing a better system that would help Filipino workers excel and become more competitive, during a meeting with members of the Private Sector Advisory Council’s (PSAC) job sector in Malacañan Palace.
“It’s really skills training. We have to upskill everybody. We need to have a system that will work with everyone,” Marcos said, as quoted by the Office of the Press Secretary (OPS) in a news release on Saturday.
Undersecretary Cheloy Garafil, officer in charge of the OPS, said that besides workers’ skills development and learning recovery programmes, also discussed during the meeting were vital initiatives and other programmes aimed at creating more jobs for the Filipino workforce.
For its part, the PSAC presented its recommendations to Marcos to accelerate the creation of quality jobs in the country.
Marcos also cited the need to acknowledge micro-credentials to make Filipino workers adaptable and diversely skilled, Garafil said.
Micro-credentials are short skills-focused qualifications that seek to support learners to skill up in a wide array of knowledge areas.
“Yung (The) micro-credentials, it’s not a four-year course. It’s not a degree. But you can present this to qualify for a job,” Marcos said.
According to Garafil, the President also wants to “retrain and reskill” overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who wish to come back to the country for good, with Marcos citing the efforts to upskill workers in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry for offshore medical jobs.
Garafil noted that to scale up micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), the PSAC recommended granting them access to money, markets, and mentoring, as well as enabling them to undertake digital transformation.
Created under the Marcos administration, the PSAC is composed of business leaders and experts who aid the government to achieve its economic goals and revitalise the country’s economy.
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