DICT pushes for cybersecurity, software engineering training as Pinoy experts preferred abroad — official

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is working on short course training and programs for cybersecurity and software engineering as several countries want to source experts from the Philippines.

At Malacañang press briefing Tuesday, DICT Secretary Ivan Uy disclosed that in one of his recent travels, one country asked if the Philippines can supply 100,000 software engineers.

However, Uy said that will be a challenging task for the Philippines unlike in China and in India where they can easily source experts in different fields of technology.

"All of these countries are looking at sourcing those talents and Philippines is one of the first areas that they look at kasi magagaling daw tayong mga hackers. I think back in year 2001, we landed in the world stage with the ‘I love you virus.’ So the Filipinos are well known as early technology adopters," he said.

"The world, all the technology companies look at the Philippines as a country that is composed of young people who are early technology adopters and so they expect that we would produce a lot  of these talents and that will be the new answer. These are very high paying jobs and the demand is very very high," he added.

Currently, Uy said there are 3 million job vacancies for cybersecurity experts around the globe.

While there is a high demand for Filipino technology experts, Uy lamented that there are only a few who attained proper training and proper certification to be employed.

So far, Uy said the Philippines has around 200 certified cybersecurity experts, as compared to Singapore which has 3,000.

"We need to build up that competency...Ang nangyayari kasi na marami tayong mga talented na technical people pero di sila nagka-qualify for the job kasi wala silang credentials, yung certification. Kumbaga ano ito self-learned," he said.

One of the objectives of the DICT is to give these Filipino experts the means to get those credentials by working with big technology companies as well as the private and public educational institutions, he said.

"We are deploying skills upgrading in order to get our young people interested in digital skills. That will be necessary to answer the needs of our employers. They are all asking for software engineers, cybersecurity experts, blockchain experts, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and many more, [financial technology]," he said.

"So the DICT is working with all our educational partners from the private sector as well as government institutions like TESDA, like DepEd like CHED in order to deploy course materials and certification programs and hopefully, if we do have more funds, scholarship programs in order to be able to build up more competency in the [science, technology, engineering and mathematics area. That is the job on demand currently worldwide," he said.

Further, Uy said this skills upgrading program is in line with the DICT's relaunching of other initiatives that will encourage investments in the business process management in the country.

He said the DICT is looking at developing several digital cities which can host at least 31 business process units.

"I think we need to build up the interest and we need to develop the necessary talents. So 'yan ho ang pinagkakaabalahan natin kasi hindi lang ito abroad itong BPOs natin sa Pilipinas, mga financial institutions natin, mga bangko, business sector they are looking for that." — RSJ, GMA Integrated News