DOLE pushes for blue collar jobs
There might be glamour in white collar work but there are actual jobs in the blue collar sector.
This, the Department of Labor and Employment 6 revealed, as it pushes for labor stakeholders to cooperate to address job mismatch in the country.
“After all, nasa blue collar ‘yung trabaho – driver, welder, construction worker, carpenter, and these are high-paying jobs, even abroad,” said Labor Regional Director Manuel Roldan said.
However, he also acknowledged the stigma attached to blue collar jobs. “Nobody would like to enrol because of the stigma that it’s a lowly type of job... Ngayon, kahit nurse, okay lang kahit ang trabaho sa mall... aircon nga naman.”
Blue collar workers refer to the members of the working class who typically performs manual labor and earns an hourly wage.
While there might be a need for white collar jobs, Manuel said that in-demand and hard-to-fill jobs in the region are those involved in the blue collar industry.
Based on “Project Jobs Fit: The DOLE 2020 Vision” Summary Report of Regional Consultation in Region 6, the priority industries are those in cyber services, tourism (health, wellness and medical), hotels and restaurants, agribusiness and fishery, construction, and wholesale and retail trade.
The emerging industries, meanwhile, are those in the sectors of renewable energy and biofuel, real estate development, transport and logistics, and mining (small scale).
In the cyber-service, the study showed that there is need for call center/customer service agents, engineers, accountants, personal assistants, virtual assistants, researchers, and programmers.
For tourism (health, wellness and medical), the labor demand are for those working as massage/spa therapists and doctors while for hotels and restaurants, there is a need for cooks, service crews, butlers, reservation officers, and tour guides.
For agribusiness, the needed workers are aquaculturists and entrepreneurs while in the construction industry, there is a demand for construction workers, heavy equipment operators/mechanics, pipefitters, riggers, welders, mechanical engineers, electrical/civil engineers, and safety officers.
Based on the medium and long term demand, the skills which are deemed hard-to-fill in the renewable energy and bio-fuel industries are chemist and chemical engineers while the highly in-demand skills for medium and long term development are mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, quality control engineer, checkers, loaders, farm workers, drivers, maintenance workers, and office workers.
For the transport and logistics, the in-demand skills are forklift operators, gantry operators, checkers, drivers (for trailers or long haul), crane operators, backhoe operators, safety engineers, and maintenance mechanics.
Some of these jobs are also hard to fill because most of these people are now working abroad, Roldan noted.
The in-demand skills for real estate development include those of building managers, construction managers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, civil engineers, architects, construction workers, foreman, masons, and welders but heavy equipment operators and safety engineers are considered hard-to-fill skills.
In the small-scale mining, the in-demand and hard-to-fill skills are loaders, surveyors, miners, geodetic engineers, mechanical engineers, geologists, chemists, safety engineers, lab technicians, drillers, and blasters.
Jobs Fit
For Roldan, the common and unending employment issue is always job mismatch.
Every year, traditional courses become a trend and a bandwagon that’s why a series of consultations were conducted on how to address the mismatch.
“While there may be jobs available, nandoon pa rin yung unemployed. The basic question is bakit graduate naman ito, skilled naman ito pero hindi natatanggap,” he added.
From this end, the Jobs Fit Project Jobs Fit: The DOLE 2020 Vision was born.
The project identified the preferred skills in priority industries by building on the capacities of stakeholders such as academe, industry and government.
The project output primarily guides the students, new entrants to the labor market, and out of school-youth in identifying college/tech-voc courses that they will pursue. It will also be the basis of concerned stakeholders in providing training and educational scholarships, and developing appropriate curricula and career materials, among others.
The project also identified the college courses where jobs are available.*
