A HOUSE leader on Tuesday underscored the need to identify, in general, the skills needed to help the economy recover and make it resilient.

This was stressed by Albay 2nd District Representative Joey Sarte Salceda following a Commission on Human Rights (CHR) situational report that new graduates are finding it more difficult to land jobs as many of them lack “soft skills” such as empathy, creativity, resilience, communication, and practical job traits that normally being honed during face-to-face classes.

“Now, this is no debate about whether we should prioritize soft skills over hard skills. What we should instead do is to figure out what kind of skills, in general, our economy needs to thrive and be resilient,” Salceda, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, said on the challenges that new graduates being faced in a “post-pandemic normal.”

Salceda also explained that “the issue of finding it hard to land jobs exists in the context of elevated inflation.”

“Food, fuel, and power are expensive – so we need to keep their prices low to keep wages competitive. That is the best way to produce enough jobs to hire new entrants to our workforce,” Salceda said. “But the jobs figures seem to indicate a problem of hard skills, as well.”

But Salceda explained that the CHR’s observation is consistent with global studies, which indicate that learning did suffer as a result of being forced to isolate and study without the company of peers,

“I wouldn’t immediately jump into the conclusion, however, that the lack of ‘soft skills’ is primarily the source of youth unemployment,” Salceda said.

If anything, according to Salceda, looking at the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) labor data on professions, it appears that hard skills suffered just as much, if not more, during the (COVID-19) pandemic.

Salceda said almost all professions increased in the number of employed persons year-on-year from February 2022 to February 2023, except the following:

a. Managers (lost 941,000)

b. Skilled agriculture, forestry, and fisheries (lost 108,000)

c. Crafts, trades, and related workers (lost 30,000)

He said the case for a soft skills deficit can be made for the loss of managers, although economic conditions and firm structure likely explain that number better.

But the loss of jobs in skilled professions is a “clear and undeniable problem” of hard skills, Salceda said.

“Soft skills itself as a class of skills requires certain hard skills. In my conversations with the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector, one key skill issue is that while Filipino BPO workers, particularly in the voice sector, are very courteous and respectful, some of them lack the technical competence to efficiently solve the customer’s problem,” Salceda said.

“Other soft skills, such as leadership, depend on technical proficiency and competence, too,” he said.

“Certain skills are obviously more relevant: language proficiency, particularly in English, engineering, the computer sciences, and increasingly, medical sciences – especially in an aging world. Certain soft skills are also essential, especially those relevant (to) entrepreneurship and innovation,” Salceda said.

“Finally, on the job hunt, we as a country must accept that the world is moving from individuals looking for jobs to individuals creating those jobs themselves. India, which produces 15 million engineers every year, has the most tech startups in the world – a case of engineers creating their own jobs,” Salceda added.