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A young, adventurous Filipino with a basic certification from Cisco,
the global networking giant, can fly to Singapore today and get a
desktop support job—or something better—within days. The Cisco
certification, which states that the holder passed the Cisco
Certified Network Assistant (CCNA) exam, is the passport to
employment.
Young men and women certified by Cisco as Cisco
Certified Network Professionals, or CCNP, are deluged with job
offers from overseas. US companies routinely sponsor CCNP holders,
three years of sure employment at an average salary of $70,000 a
year.
Japan, the country with probably the toughest
visa requirement on foreign workers, will readily grant a visa to a
passer of the Philnits exam, which to Japanese employers, is the
equivalent of passing an IT proficiency exam. Not too many questions
are asked of Filipino job seekers with Philnits certificates. Japan
needs IT brainpower, regardless of where they come from.
Bill Gates has been asking Congress to remove
the cap on the number of US work visas available to IT professionals
from across the globe. In the meantime, he is setting up satellite
offices for Microsoft in Canada to temporarily settle foreign IT
workers hired by Microsoft. They can train and work there while
awaiting their US work visas.
While India fills in much of Microsoft’s
hunger for IT talent, skilled Filipino IT professionals routinely
get hired by Microsoft.
While every Filipino parent’s dream is to send
a nurse to the United States, England or elsewhere, the low-key
Filipino IT workers, the ones with real skills in networking
technologies, programming and embedded technologies have been
dramatically reshaping the overseas employment landscape.
They are everywhere. They get the pay of MBA
graduates. Foreign companies walk the extra mile to recruit them.
They get perks and privileges commensurate to their status as elite
technology workers.
All of these breakthroughs have been achieved
without a government agency looking after them.
So this question is worth pondering: was it
possible to have achieved more with the presence of an agency
fiercely determined to look after the affairs of the information
communication technology (ICT) sector, such as training and
nurturing the skills of IT talents?
In is this context that pushed the majority of
the members of the House of Representatives to readily approve the
proposed Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT)
bill despite deep-seated (and legitimate) concerns about creating
another government bureaucracy. Probably, the senators will follow
the cue, throw caution to the wind, and pass the same.
Of course, putting in place the environment and
infrastructure to double or triple the number of skilled Filipino IT
professionals within the short term is a peripheral job of the
proposed DICT. Establishing a national broadband, attracting
investments into the ICT sector and creating ICT enclaves are more
important concerns.
The BPOs in the country have to evolve and this
is a work cut out for the proposed DICT. They have to progress from
being contact center-oriented to providers of mature and
sophisticated technology services. The DICT should study and emulate
the Indian model.
Fighting or easing corruption in the ICT sector
will be an important work of the proposed department in the short
term.
The sordid ZTE NBN scandal would not have
happened with a DICT overseeing the national effort to create a
national technology broadband. The absence of a DICT, the lack of
policy directions on ICT and the dearth of government technology
managers made the sordid scam possible.
Let us not forget that Ben Abalos was with the
Commission on Elections and Jun Lozada was with Philippine Forest
Corporation when they got tangled into the mess of the NBN deal.
They had no right meddling into a purely ICT concern. But no was
there to tell them so. So they just welcomed themselves in.
Other good things would hopefully come about
with the creation of the DICT. For one, the government may finally
see the light of day and come to the conclusion that it needs to
revamp and restructure the vast bureaucracy.
Once the DICT is in place, government managers
can start collapsing sunset government agencies that are barely
relevant. The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), for example, will
be irrelevant in three years time, after the land redistribution
work is over. The provision of support and auxiliary services, which
is a concern of the Department of Agriculture (DA), is the
full-blown work after land redistribution. So they can just collapse
the DAR and energize the DA.
So many state agencies can be merged, collapsed
or simply sent to the archives.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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