TESDA (PNA file photo by Cristina Arayata)
MANILA – An official of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) on Wednesday said the high employability of TVET (technical and vocational education and training) graduates can be attributed to the agency's partnerships with the industries.
In his third State of the Nation Address last Monday, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. reported that eight of 10 TVET graduates land decent jobs.
"With its high employability rate, TVET will be instrumental in capacitating our people, and in maintaining our employment rate at consistently high levels," Marcos said.
In post-SONA discussions, TESDA Deputy Director General Rosanna Urdaneta said the high rate is because of the agency's industry partnerships.
"It starts with sitting down with the industry on developing, on trying to identify the skills they need. Together, we develop competency standards and curriculum, and come up with assessment packages," she said.
TESDA is looking at the demands in various sectors, to open programs based on the demand of the industries.
"What we are trying to do is to operationalize the concept of area-based demand driven. Our meetings with the industry, as well as sectoral meetings with the President, enable us to tell them the challenges encountered by TESDA," she said.
Meanwhile, TESDA and the Department of Education have worked together in incorporating TVET programs into senior high school curricula.
Urdaneta clarified that these TVET programs do not include the usual skills such as cooking and carpentry, but more on web development, visual graphics design, events management, and agri-entrepreneurship.
The official said they are currently working with DepEd and the Commission on Higher Education in developing the curriculum incorporating the TVET programs.
"We need to train the teachers on how to contextualize TVET skills into the subjects," Urdaneta added. (PNA)
