Midanaotoday.com | DOLE CDOFO-PESO gear for relevant and effective career matching among Oro youths
CAGAYAN DE ORO – The DOLE-10’s Cagayan de Oro field office in partnership with the Public Employment Service Office-Cagayan de Oro conducted the 2023 Career Trends and Matching Forum for the eighty Career Guidance Counselors from both private and public schools at the De Luxe Hotel, this city, on March 28.
With the City Ordinance 13799-2020, also known as the “Institutionalizing career coaching and employment counseling for all grades 10 and 12 learners and qualified enrollees of the alternative learning system (ALS) of the public and private senior high schools in the city of Cagayan de Oro, and for other purposes,” this event is timely and relevant.
In her keynote speech, Councilor Suzette Magtajas-Daba, the author of the aforementioned ordinance, emphasized that career coaching will make education more worthwhile and make more opportunities available for the youth of the City – not only limiting themselves to career options that may not be sustainable as the world modernizes.
“This will also ensure that the hard work and products of educational institutions of the city would not go to waste,” she said.
Lawyer Johnson Cañete, a resource speaker who is a former DOLE regional director and labor attaché, discussed relevant topics such as labor market information; hard-to-fill jobs; emerging skills and industries; workforce development in the digital economy; importance of human skills also known as “soft skills”; business-enabling skills; digital building block skills; top ten job skills for the future and the importance of bridging quality education to better employability in the modern times.
Cañete stressed the importance of teachers in a young individual’s journey towards building their own knowledge and skills set that are relevant to the career that they want to pursue.
Young individuals must be encouraged with up-to-date information about the evolving needs of workforce.
In the same event, PESO Manager Kathleen Kate Sorilla introduced the functions of the Public Employment Service Office on top of being the source of “summer jobs.”
Sorilla stressed the importance of administering career orientation to the youth as early as in their 7th grade for them to be able to appreciate the value of work and to be introduced to various courses and skills that have a higher rate of employability.
In this way, they will be able to choose the right course for them, contrary to the common practice of Filipino families where adults dictate the career path of younger individuals, either directly or through idealistic expectation setting which only leads to costly career shifts, employee burnout, and unemployment in general.
Provincial Director Emmanuel Toledo of DOLE-10 CDO Field Office expressed his appreciation and gratitude to the guidance counselors who participated in the forum and encouraged them to strengthen collaboration with the PESO-CDO and DOLE-10 CDOFO for a more updated labor market information that will provide guidance to their students.
Toledo further envisioned for a more active and more engaging partnerships with all the guidance counselors in the city to deliver meaningful, quality and impact-filled employment to the youth in the city. (DOLE-10)
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