SHORT-term courses that ensure high employability for enrollees of the proposed City College were raised in Wednesday afternoon’s deliberations for the City College ordinance held at the City Council session hall.
“(Once the City College opens), it should offer feasible, short-term courses and simple diploma programs that are part of the emerging job markets. (For example) there’s a demand for special education specifically in physical education, music, and arts. And we have data based on industry surveys (from sources like) DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment),” said Roxanne Tandang, vice president for finance of the Cagayan de Oro-Technical Vocational College (CDO-TVI).
Tandang and CDO-TVI Administrator Maria Victoria Trinidad were among the resource persons tapped during ongoing deliberations of the proposed City College ordinance.
Tandang was responding to a question posed by Councilor Malvern Esparcia on whether there was data supporting the viability of short-term, certificate-based programs for inclusion in the proposed City College curriculum.
While acknowledging the big gap between what courses city-based students want to enroll in and what jobs are in demand by employers, Tandang said they can look into alternatives that ensure the employability of graduates.
“How do we address this? For example, (a lot of students want to enroll in) criminology and it has a board exam but many students fail to pass,” she said.
Rather than pursuing a criminology course, Tandang suggested that the proposed City College offer a course on Industrial Security, a related field.
“The Regional Development Council (RDC) issued a document listing priority courses and programs (for northern Mindanao including Cagayan de Oro,” she said, citing a feasibility study done by the technical working group for the City College project.
“Based on the results of the feasibility study, a lot of our out-of-school youths (OSYs) and even graduating senior high schools want specialized certificate programs that in six months to one year they can graduate and immediately secure a job,” Trinidad said. One such short-term course included in the City College curriculum is AI or artificial intelligence, a six-month information technology course.
In his message via Zoom, Global SaaS vice president Thor Japo Turrecha—point person for the City College AI program—said IT courses such as the AI program offered by the city to an initial batch of 15 city-based students will open a lot of job openings both locally and abroad.
“The IT industry is booming in India and other countries (like ours),” he said. (Stephen Capillas of City Information Office)
