30 October 2013
Skills training programs funded by the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) yielded high employment rate, putting to work more than 90,000 graduates of various courses managed by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
"The Disbursement Acceleration Program of the Aquino government yielded good results for us and the thousands of graduates that are now gainfully employed," Secretary Joel Villanueva, TESDA director general, said.
"It's not always the devil that is in the details, the good can be found, too, if we will just bother to check," he said.
A total of P1.1 billion was released to TESDA in October 2011 through the DAP, and how this fund was utilized was backed by records and an authentic list of beneficiaries. This produced close to 150,000 graduates.
TESDA used the funds to supplement the Training for Work Scholarship Program (I-TWSP), in which P500 million went to the Information Technology-Business Process Outsourcing (IT-BPO) sector, and P600 million to support the skills requirement in four priority sectors - agriculture/agri-business; tourism, retirement, health and wellness; general infrastructure; and electronics/semi-conductor.
“The Training for Work Scholarship program (TWSP) is one of our existing programs funded under the General Appropriations Act. Based on our data, six out of 10 graduates who availed of the scholarship got employed within six months to one year after training," Villanueva said.
In the IT-BPO sector, 75,479 completed the training from the 75,682 individuals who enrolled. This resulted to a 70.7 percent employment rate for those programs implemented in partnership with the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP). BPAP has provided TESDA with the list of the names of the employed graduates for this sector.
To maximize resources and ensure high employment rate of graduates, TESDA partnered with BPAP for the joint management of the implementation of the I-TWSP.
Under the memorandum of agreement, TESDA allocated scholarship vouchers to BPAP to train near-hires in the IT-BPO industry for "pre-employment training and retooling of incoming workers in the IT-BPO sector."
BPAP, on the other hand, engaged its different associations for the training requirements, such as the Animation Council of the Philippines for Animation, Contact Center Association of the Philippines, Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing Association of the Philippines, Philippine Software Industry Association, and the National ICT Council of the Philippines. These associations in turn engaged TESDA-accredited companies and training institutions with TESDA-registered programs to undertake the training of qualified near-hires.
An additional P18 million was allocated for the BPAP for the implementation of the Training Methodology Plus (TM Plus) program for 900 IT-BPO trainers.
In the semi-conductor sector, one of the industry partners of TESDA is the Semiconductor and Electronics Industries in the Philippines, which produced a total of 2,404 graduates, of which 2,044 or 85 percent are already employed.
For the other four priority sectors, there were 73,632 graduates out of the 73,848 who enrolled. This can be further broken down as follows: Agriculture/Agri-business (2,473 graduates); Tourism, Retirement, Health and Wellness (42,712 graduates); General Infrastructure (21,793 graduates); and, Electronics and Semi-conductor (6,654 graduates).
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