Hiring foreign IT educators could expand PH’s tech workforce
PLDT Chairman Manny Pangilinan is urging the Philippines to hire IT professors from other countries to produce more local talent in the tech industry.
During the PLDT Digicon 2022, Pangilinan said that the country faces the challenge of teaching “proper” IT courses and finding qualified experts to teach in this field.
He stated that privately-sponsored tech scholarships are helpful, but the country needs a “surplus to prepare for poaching.”
“We need professors, we need to import them, some of them anyway, to be able to precisely accomplish the kind of IT engineers that we need in the future and produce a surplus,” Pangilinan added.
The telecom chief also shared that he was once asked by a chief transformation officer of a global conglomerate if there were enough IT people, software engineers, and programmers in the Philippines.
“I said no, not enough, and it’s exacerbated by the fact that whichever IT persons we graduate are poached abroad. If now foreign countries are getting our basketball players I suppose they will get more importantly the IT person,” Pangilinan answered.
According to the recruitment portal Jobstreet, encoders, engineers, virtual assistants, and IT professionals were among the top remote jobs in the Philippines as of June 2022.
