RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Seven Choices for Success and Significance by Dr. Nido R. Qubein

What is success? Only you can define it in your own life. In my own life, I have attempted to define both Success and Significance. To me, Success is secular. Significance is spiritual. It doesn't matter how you define your own spirituality. Spiritual matters are always finer, deeper, and longer lasting than secular matters. Success focuses on three Fs: • Fans • Fame • Fortune Success is focused on tasks, even goals. Significance also focuses on three Fs: • Faith • Family • Friends But, significance focuses on purpose. Why am I here? What do I do with the talents, experiences and skills that I have? How can I make the world a better place? How do I plant seeds of greatness in the lives of those around me? How do I make an impact in the circles of influence where I find or place myself? To choose success and significance, you must be a strategic thinker who: • Has a clear vision of what you want to accomplish • Develops a solid strategy that answers three questions: - Who or what are we today? - Who do we want to become? - How do we get there? • Employs practical systems to achieve your goals • Commits to consistent execution because in consistency, success emerges. When implementing your strategic plan for success, it really comes down to three "Ds": Decide what you want most to achieve Determine the first step to getting what you want Do the first thing that will start you moving toward your goal. Using these seven keys, you can choose success and significance. But keep this in mind: success is not a matter of luck, not an accident of birth, not a reward for virtue. The most successful people I know are the ones who have something to do, somewhere to be and someone to love. No one is responsible for your success or your joy. You must search for it and be in a continual state of earning it. To merely succeed is not an end in itself. You must use your success to impact other people...to impact the world...to Live Life from the Inside Out. It all starts with the choices you make—they determine the person you will become. (An excerpt from Seven Choices for Success and Significance by Dr. Nido R. Qubein) -Editor-

Education and our Global Competitiveness in the Job Market

"Education and our Global Competitiveness in the Job Market"
by Dr. Edgar Gabay Agustilo

Over the last two decades or from 1990 to 2010, the World Bank reported some trends in skills demand and supply insights into ways to build and use the critical skills needed to sustain global competitiveness of the Philippine economy.

According to this view (World Bank Report No. 50096-PH: Philippine Skills Report. Human Development Department, East Asia and Pacific Region, March 2010), there is a dramatic increase in educational attainment in just less than two decades, reflected in higher shares of workforce with higher education levels.

At the same time, however, there are initial indications that demand for skills has kept on growing and that there may be emerging skills gaps, suggesting that skills are becoming a constraining factor for the economy.

The report has three main areas: the characteristics of the demand for skills in the Philippines; any evidence of emerging skill gaps; and the extent to which the education and training sector provides the skills required by the economy.

It pays particular attention to the “functional” skills that workers need to be equipped with to be employable and support firms’ competitiveness and productivity, and to the role of the education and training system in providing them.

Skill demand has been growing and changing in the Philippines related to changes in output and employment structure across and within sectors, openness to new technology and pressures of international competition.

Demand for skills is growing driven by the service sector. Education upgrading is less evident and focused on less highly skilled workers in manufacturing although the service sector may reflect a need for higher academic, generic and technical skills, but also, possibly some “education inflation”.

As the service sector continues to develop and modernize and grow in terms of both overall GDP and employment, we can expect demand for skills to continue changing and growing in the country.

Other significant determinants of demand for skills are export orientation and access to technology. The relation between exports and skills in the service sector together with the evidence on the education and occupation profile of Filipinos before emigration suggests that emigration is another driver of demand for skills.

There are interactions between domestic and overseas demand. Beyond responding to the needs of the demand, adequate skills are central for improving the long-term innovation potential and competitiveness of the Philippines economy.

In this context, a number of critical skills stand out as crucial for the Filipino workforce.

The World Bank’s analysis shows strong needs for critical skills with focus on:

1. A combination of job specific and generic skills. Critical skills include the capacity to work independently and communicating effectively, as well as practical knowledge of the job, across all sectors and occupations; problem solving and leadership for managers/professionals; teamwork, time management and better grounding in theory for skilled production and sales staff.

2. Higher level skills applicable to the service sector – including the continuous provision of some key careers such as business and finance (also provided at the post-secondary level), as well as high level academic and behavioral skills particularly applicable to the sector, such as excellent literacy levels and client-orientation skills, including communication and foreign language (foreign language is currently under-estimated by employers but latest findings on English skills are suggesting that this is an area with long-term implications for development which needs more attention).

3. Skills supporting a more competitive manufacturing sector - including skills such as problem solving and creative thinking – particularly important in the manufacturing and export sector -, as well as sufficient supply of technical skills and some technologically advanced fields, at both an intermediate and higher level, to help manufacturing firms adapt technological innovations, face international competition and, ultimately, improve their productivity and competitiveness.

Unfortunately, many of these skills are under-provided: the economy is facing emerging skill gaps. Causes for emerging skill gaps are multiple, including reasons related to overall skill supply (quantity-quality) and labor market.

Quality and relevance of education and training is the most preeminent constraint across the board, much more than overall quantity constraints. What are the main skill gaps?

The quality of employed graduates is better than the one for the overall population –where even basic academic gaps are noticeable – but weaknesses persist.

Weaknesses include gaps in critical generic skills abovementioned and, to a lesser extent, gaps in some job-specific/technical skills.

The evidence for the service sector points to skill mismatch related to lack of relevant education fields, and insufficient quality of higher (and secondary) education, with persistent gaps in some key generic skills.

The evidence for the manufacturing sector points to largely labor related issues for managers and professionals, and quality and relevance related issues of postsecondary vocational education for skilled production workers.

Some of the skill gaps also have particularly strong implications for longer-term competitiveness and innovation.

Finally, the report also point to youth employability issues with several possible underlying reasons and remedies.

Weaknesses of Skill Supply and Main Policy Directions

There is clear potential for improving the quality and relevance of higher education, in particular vis-à-vis the needs of the service sector.

Although the coverage of the system has quite drastically increased, performance remains mixed.

Similarly, there is potential to improve the quality and relevance of post-secondary Technical Vocational Education Training or TVET education vis-à-vis the needs of the manufacturing and, as needed, service sector.

While there are promising signals on the relevance to labor market needs of non formal secondary education, there are still some unresolved critical issues:

Post-employment training could also be further improved in both its coverage and Quality

General Policy Recommendations

(1) The need for more international benchmarking of institutions and students.

(2) The need for strengthening generic, or life, skills in the curricula of all education and training levels, including putting an increased emphasis on pedagogical practices which shape work habits; while making sure job-specific skills receive the due importance with particular focus on the continuous development and strengthening of practical skills through adequate pedagogical practices and school-industry linkages.

(3) The need for better articulation of the different pillars of the skill supply system through better overall governance, a strengthened skills certification and education and training quality assurance system and appropriate pathways and bridges across different types of institutions.
(4) The need for more flexibility in curriculum and academic decisions and continuous participation of the private sector (under an improved quality assurance framework).

5) The need to support closer linkages between post-secondary and tertiary education and industries by intensifying collaboration in curriculum design, training and Research and Development or R&D.

(6) The need for improving the quantity and quality of the information on the labor market (with for instance better and more complete business and labor force surveys).

Specific Policy Recommendations

I Higher (and Basic) Education
• Improve funding and incentives for upgrading faculty qualifications
• Improve university facilities
• Improve pre-college preparation to improve tertiary outcomes. The Philippines could consider expanding the current 10-year basic education system to the more internationally-accepted 12-year system, as Mongolia has recently done. International evidence has shown that better prepared students perform significantly better at the tertiary level. More analysis and evidence on this issue is however needed before taking a decision.
• Institutionalize and systematize accreditation to promote quality of institutions and programs. • Consolidate or close non-performing institutions and publish and disseminate information on performance
• Related to quality assurance, although outside the direct sphere of action of higher education, revise certification policies to improve the match between professions and labor market needs. • Foster university-industry linkages by institutionalizing and accrediting On-the- Job Trainings or OJTs.
• Foster university-industry linkages by gathering more information and subsequently strengthening consultative mechanisms between industry and academia.
• Foster university-industry linkages by including industry input into curriculum design for relevant fields, promoting use of university labs by industry, promoting joint R&D projects, and licensing of university-held patents.
• Undertake a thorough set of tracer studies to follow graduates to learn lessons about the relevance of their education.
• Improve funding mechanisms to expand access.
II Technical and Vocational Education
• Induce greater participation of the private sector to reduce government expenditure while improving efficiency.
• Continue supporting community-based programs while reviewing the efficiency of some school-based ones.
• Reduce government costs through the rationalization of Technical Vocational Education Training or TVET providers.
• Develop appropriate performance standards for TVET providers.
• Update and enforce accreditation standards.
• Foster closer school-industry linkages, in particular for school-based programs, to improve the relevance of curriculum to labor market needs (School-based programs have lower employment rates than other programs).
• Increase industry participation in the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority or TESDA Board.
• Improve targeting of financial assistance for TVET.
III Alternative Learning System or ALS
• Prioritize ALS efforts to young, functionally illiterates.
• Adopt IT instruction on a larger scale.
• Establish an effective planning and coordinating authority for ALS sub-sector.
• Establish an information system to monitor and evaluate performance of ALS graduates.
• Devote a larger proportion of the education budget to Bureau of Alternative Learning Systems or BALS (in combination with evidence of improved effectiveness)
• Support closer linkages with industry.
IV In-Service Training
• Improve access to finance to support higher training coverage.
• Provide more incentives for employees to pursue outside training on their own.
• Plan the training courses around the job-specific skills weakly provided by the education sector.
• Improve quality and relevance of public training institutions. There is an urgent need to make pedagogy more interactive and provide more materials and equipment.
• Make private training institutes more affordable.

KUNG EDUKASYON ANG SOLUSYON, UNSA DIAY ANG PROBLEMA?

by Dr. Edgar Gabay Agustilo

Editor

Bridging the gap between those who have more in life and those who have less could overcome      disadvantage as an effective change agent or catalyst for social change in Santa Catalina, specifically when it comes at improving education. Why education?

Needless to say, the most urgent problem in development is quality education and lack of access to quality education because quality education is concentrated only in urban centers leaving the rural areas marginalized.  

Yet schooling becomes the key institution in a meritocratic selection process. It performs an important role function in the development and maintenance of a modern, democratic society which in economic development means economic progress especially with regard to social stability, peace and the sum-total happiness for all.

Noneless, poverty is caused by lack of education and lack of education caused poverty. This twin problem of poverty and lack of access to quality education creates a generational stranglehold on certain people, produces an economic lag, which make it more difficult. 

The world as we know it is a changing. Managing change is one of the key to change, it is a necessary tool for development. Unless we learn how to effectively manage change, we will find ourselves managed by the changes that are as inevitable as the sun rising and sitting.

Change happens only through people. Change is necessary to managing change. Human resource is one essential ingredient for the success of an organization. In fact, the forces that have spawned globalization for the 21^st Century have launched us where the imperative to compete puts premium in human resources. 

In a global economy as we know it, the capability to develop depends upon our ability to provide the necessary physical and social infrastructures that would enable us to receive, diffuse, or process information into utilitarian knowledge, and thus become production bases, which is the equivalent of economic development. 

If the education system such as ours renege to diffuse knowledge, a technological lag is likely to develop into an economic lag, thus making the catching-up process more difficult than it already is. 

Thus, the existence of the Sta. Catalina Global Association, as an organization, to espouse change, is justified in so far as it has for its primary purpose, the development of society. We can impact on change and development because we believe in making a difference.

In the theory of functional change, Kurt Lewin (2004), developed a three-stage model of planned change, namely how to initiate, manage, and stabilize the change process, thus:

1.          the change process involves learning something new, as well as discontinuing current attitudes, behaviors, or organizational practices

2.            change will not occur unless there is motivation to change, which is often the most difficult part of the change process

3.          people are the hub of all organizational changes whether in terms of structure, group process, reward systems, or job design, it requires individuals to change

4.               resistance to change is found even when the goals of change are highly desirable,

5.               and effective change requires reinforcing new behaviors, attitudes, and organizational practices.

Every Santahanon should initiate change with passion and commitment to make our town a better place to live, which is a small step in the right direction for a better future for the next generation, for survival and world relevance.

Take a look at these statistics in the last decade:

Among Filipinos, Ages 10 to 64 years old,

19% are college level or higher

32% high school level or high school graduate

30% elementary school level or elementary graduate

9% zero schooling

By 2015, the Philippine Labor Force will be 41.4 million

But only 3.4 million or 8% will have college degree or higher

This include Filipinos who will migrate

For every 1,000 entering Grade One,

439 will graduate from Grade 6

249 will graduate from Grade 6 in 9.6 years

312 will not graduate

and only 7% will have at least, 75% in Mathematics,  English and Science

Thus, for every 1,000 entering Grade One,

                   395 will finish high school

                   162 will finish Basic Education in 10 years      

                   233 will finish Basic Education in 16 years

                   605 will not graduate

Put in another way, only 19% from more or less 98 million Filipinos has college education. What are the effects of all these problems?  

Illiteracy “exacerbates the cycle of poverty” and hampers efforts to effect social progress.

The costs are enormous, according to the United Nation Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Illiteracy exacerbates cycles of poverty, ill-health and deprivation. It weakens communities and undermines democratic processes through MARGINALIZATION and EXCLUSION.

These and other impacts can combine to destabilize societies.

Literacy unlocks the capacity of individuals to imagine and create a more fulfilling future. It opens the way to greater justice, equality and progress.

            Literacy can heal, advance political processes and contribute to the common good.

           The world urgently needs increased political commitment to literacy backed by adequate resources to scale up effective programs. 

This is the call of the hour.