The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) expressed their worries that the first batch of K-12 graduates this coming March might not still be ready to work in a professional workplace.
PCCI said that the minimum requirement of 80 hours or 2 weeks for the students’ on-the-job training was not enough to prepare them for skilled jobs.
“Majority of those 600,000 [students], I don’t think they really got the sufficient training,” Alberto Fenix, president of PCCI HR Dev’t Foundation, said in an interview with ABS-CBN.
PCCI also said that this current education system still needs a lot of help and improvement.
The Department of Education (DepEd) said that they will consider the concerns of the PCCI, but they will stick with the current curriculum.
Undersecretary Tonisito Umali said that the on-the-job training or immersion is not the main focus of the K-12 curriculum.
He said that this new system was formed with the help of government agencies like the
Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).
Umali also believes that senior high school graduates will be satisfactorily geared up for work, despite PCCI’s observations.
The K-12 curriculum is the extended basic education system of DepEd. One of its main objectives is to help students who can’t afford to go to college to still attain a job.
They shld hve not include the K-12.. parents are just suffering for that 2 years of senoir high… instead of 4 to 5 years in college then they are ready to work.. that 2 years consume in senior high shld have been use and can be a choice of parents and student to take vocational courses in TESDA for them to be prepare for work, if the family is not capable of sending children in colleges and universities…..