BAGUIO CITY—Only 7,000 Cordillerans have availed of the government’s Training For Work Scholarship Program for various competencies that will help them find employment in the future, the regional Technical Education and Skills Development Authority announced Thursday.
Rafael Abrogar II, TESDA-CAR regional director, said 23,000 TWSP slots are still available for interested Cordillerans wanting “to acquire their desired skills for gainful employment in the future, to help uplift the living condition of their families once they will land in good paying jobs.”
Tesda is running the TWSP in partnership with the different accredited technical-vocational educational institutions and provincial training centers in the region.
Based on the impact evaluation study conducted on graduates of various technical-vocational courses last year, Abrogar said 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 were searching for suitable jobs that match their acquired skills.
On the regional level, he claimed that the employment rate of TWSP graduates last year was a high 86 percent, which is an indication of the employability of skilled Cordillerans once they acquire their national certifications in the competencies they have chosen.
For 2017, Abrogar admitted the employment rate of the tech-voc graduates is “very low” at 28 percent, because the actual monitoring of their employment is still underway based on the required six-month monitoring period set by the Tesda central office.
He encouraged tech-voc 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 government scholarship.
“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 for,” Abrogar stressed.
“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,” he added.
Abrogar said Tesda-CAR has spent P23 million to shoulder the scholarship of the 7,000 Cordillerans under the present administration. The funds are meant for the 30,000 scholarship slots that should have been distributed to the different barangays in the region based on the agency’s barangay skills mapping.