BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera office of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA-CAR) announced that only 7,000 Cordillerans were able to avail of the government’s training for work scholarship program (TWSP) for various competencies that will guarantee them employable skills for gainful employment in the future.
Rafael Abrogar II, TESDA-CAR regional director, said there are still 23,000 slots for the TWSP which are available for interested Cordillerans wanting to acquire their desired skills for them to be employed and have gainful employment in the future to help uplift the living condition of their families once they will land in good paying jobs.
The government’s TWSP is being implemented by TESDA in partnership with the different accredited technical-vocational educational institutions and provincial training centers in the different parts of the region to be able to provide adequate training for various competencies to the interested applicants for them to acquire the required skills for them to be gainfully employed.
The TESDA-CAR official disclosed based on the impact evaluation study conducted on graduates of various technical-vocational courses last year, at least 70 percent of the graduates at the national level were able to be self-employed or gainfully employed while the remaining 30 percent of the graduates were said to be searching for suitable jobs that will suit their acquired skills.
In the regional level, he claimed the employment rate of the graduates last year was a high 86 percent which is an indication of the employability of skilled Cordillerans once they are able to acquire their national certifications of the competencies that they have chosen.
For this year, Abrogar admitted the employment rate of the technical-vocational graduates is actually very low at 28 percent because the actual monitoring of their employment is still underway pursuant to the required 6-month monitoring period given them by the TESDA central office.
He encouraged technical vocation graduates in the region to report to the institutions where they graduated to inform the administration of their current status to help the schools and the agency account for those who availed of the scholarship from the government.
“We are optimistic that we will be able to improve the earlier recorded employment rate of our graduates after most of them shall have been accounted. We also want the graduates to help us in the monitoring by voluntarily reporting to the institutions where they graduated and provide the needed information whether or not they have already acquired jobs, they are self-employed or they are still looking for jobs that suit their competencies,” Abrogar stressed.
Of the funds that were allocated by the agency for the 30,000 scholarship slots that should have been distributed to the different barangays pursuant to the barangay skills mapping, he stated that some P23 million was utilized by the agency to shoulder the scholarship of the 7,000 individuals that avail of the TWSP under the present administration.
The TWSP is a government intervention to provide interested in-school and out-of-school youth their desired skills from technical-vocational institutions or provincial training centers regionwide for them to become skilled workers that will guarantee their gainful employment that will allow them to earn income for their families. By HENT
