The Philippines needs to rethink how it prepares workers as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes demand for skills and many skilled Filipinos continue to seek opportunities abroad, experts said at the 12th Annual Public Policy Conference (APPC) on September 17.
Brookings Institution Non-resident Senior Fellow Elizabeth King said the country faces a potentially significant mismatch between the occupations it has been investing in and those most exposed to technological change.
“The jobs that are most vulnerable to artificial intelligence are exactly the jobs we have been investing in, which [are] clerical support jobs,” King said.
King said the challenge is compounded by unequal access to technology. Nearly 19 million people, or 17% of the population, cannot afford a minimum internet package, while AI adoption varies substantially across regions.
The country also faces a capacity gap in producing workers with the foundational cognitive skills needed to complement AI.
“It may be the capacity to generate enough workers with foundational cognitive skills required to complement AI,” King said.
King also stressed that preparing for the future workforce begins in the first 1,000 days of life.
“Stunting delays entry to school. It hurts achievement in school, completion [of] basic education, and so forth and so on,” she said.
Investments in nutrition, health, and cognitive development during these early years can strengthen the capabilities of children who will enter the workforce around 2040, she said.
Skilled workers need opportunities at home
University of the Philippines School of Economics Associate Professor Renato Reside Jr., meanwhile, linked the workforce challenge to another longstanding issue: the Philippines’ difficulty in retaining skilled workers and creating sufficient domestic demand for their skills.
“I think it is time for the Philippines to take a hard look at, as Dr. King would say, implementation,” Reside said.
He said better implementation could have helped the country retain more workers and achieve faster growth, while addressing problems such as labor migration and low real wages.
The Philippines will likely continue to rely on remittances in the near term, Reside said, but reducing that dependence would require long-term changes in the economy.
He called for a shift from wasteful to productive spending, particularly toward sectors that can raise productivity, wages, and competitiveness.
“Fix the budget process, realign away from wasteful spending to productive spending,” he said, citing manufacturing, the electric-vehicle industry, and greater domestic processing of mineral resources as potential areas for development.
Education needs to respond to local needs
Philippine Business for Education Executive Director Hanibal Camua said the workforce challenge also requires examining how education systems are governed and how much decision-making capacity is available at the local level.
“We need to discuss and further flesh out that issue on the decentralization of education,” he said, pointing to the scale of the country's basic education system, which includes roughly 47,000 public schools.
“The main question is, why aren't we decentralizing?” Camua said.
Greater local capacity could enable schools and education authorities to respond more effectively to differences in local conditions, labor market requirements, and community needs, he added.
Connect social policy to economic demand
Asian Development Bank Director Eisuke Tajima said social sector investments should be treated as part of the country’s economic growth strategy.
“One of the things I would like to really highlight at this conference is that the social sector policy and operation must be viewed as an economic growth strategy, part of it,” Tajima said.
He cited the need to break down policy silos and make education more responsive to labor-market demand.
“The Philippines needs good healthcare for healthy workers… and the education sector really needs to respond to the private sector demands,” Tajima said.
Converting investment into results
SHIFT Consulting President and Asian Institute of Management Adjunct Faculty Richard Anthony Cruz described the challenge as a “conversion problem”—whether investments in human capital actually translate into the outcomes the country needs.
“You invest the capital, but did it really result in the outcome that we're looking for?” he said.
Cruz said the country needs to identify specific opportunities where it has an advantage and develop solutions involving government, industry associations, and the private sector.
“Hopefully it's a whole-of-country approach, meaning that we have private sector, we have industry associations, we have government focused on very specific opportunities,” he said.
Cruz also said improving performance in international assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) requires a coordinated national effort rather than an approach confined to the Department of Education (DepEd).
“If we're really serious about moving the needle on PISA outcomes, we need to have a whole conference just on that 10-year plan, because it should be a whole-of-country approach, not just a DepEd approach,” Cruz said.
The 12th APPC was the culminating activity of the Development Policy Research Month led by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).
Catch the playback of the 12th APPC here: https://bit.ly/pidslive091726. ### — NMT
