White Paper No. 3 | Underserved Youth and Employment in the Philippines: Tracing PHINMA Education Graduates One Year After Graduation
Download the Full White Paper Here
ABSTRACT | PHINMA Education’s mission is to provide quality education to underserved youth towards gainful employment to make their lives and the lives of their families and communities better. It undertakes several programs, both academic and career development, to adequately equip its students with the competencies necessary in the work environment.
PHINMA Education regularly conducts tracer studies of its graduates to see the employment outcomes a year after the graduation of its students. This paper will look into the tracer surveys conducted for both 2019 and 2020 graduates. There were 1,490 respondents from 2019 graduates and 1,114 respondents from 2020 graduates. The tracer survey for the 2019 cohort was done in September-October 2020 in the middle of an economic recession, while the 2020 cohort was done in June-July 2021 during an economic recovery.
This paper will show that PHINMA Education graduates have high employability with about 82% overall employment rate pre-pandemic and fast school-to-work transition with about half of students getting their first job 3 months after graduation. However, this was affected by the pandemic, with overall employment rate dipping to 71% for the 2020 cohort and school-to-work transition for half its graduates slowing down to 6 months.
This paper will also look at other challenges encountered by PHINMA Education graduates. Among them are unemployment, irregular employment status, and low wages.
While 82% of graduates get a job at any point between their graduation to the survey period, about 15% lost or left their jobs by the time of the survey. There were also those who have never been employed since graduation, that is, 20% for the 2019 cohort and 29% for the 2020 cohort. Thus, unemployment remains a big challenge for graduates. It is also worth noting that 5% of the 2019 cohort and 10% of the 2020 cohort were not seeking jobs.
Forty-three percent (43%) of 2019 graduates and 63% of 2020 graduates were non-regular employees whose jobs may not be secure. And among those employed, only 38% of the 5-year pre-pandemic average receive at least minimum wage.
Finally, this paper acknowledges the work of the placement office, Alumni and Corporate Engagement (ACE), in assisting PHINMA Education students get a job and recommends initiatives that may be undertaken. This includes continuous aligning of curriculum with industry needs, expanding career development activities and reviewing placement activities, conducting labor market surveys among partner companies, and doing more frequent focus group discussions and engagement with employers.