This year’s jobs picture in the country seems quite good. The robust economy is producing thousands of new jobs and unemployment, hopefully, would go to such low levels not seen before this year.

But even if more people than ever before would be employed, this doesn’t mean that these new jobs are just there for the taking.

Decent jobs are available, jobs that could help the majority of our poor people improve their lives. But they must first qualify for these jobs.

Too many of our unemployed remain among the ranks of the working poor, the vulnerable and the discouraged precisely because they don’t have the skills necessary to qualify for these jobs.

Hence, most of the jobs they end up with are those that are dirty, dangerous and difficult. This is true for most developing countries like ours.

Indeed, according to the International Labor Organization, most poor people in poorer countries are likely to have jobs in the informal sector that leave them vulnerable to poverty and risks such as low earnings, dangerous working conditions and lack of health insurance.

These workers don’t earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the $1 a person a day poverty line.

The prevailing jobs-skills mismatch in the Philippines continues to be a major obstacle in attaining the Aquino administration’s quest for inclusive growth.

According to the Labor department, there have been very few applicants in their job fairs and other employment programs for those jobs that are there for the taking, which cut across the professional, technical, skilled and semi-skilled occupations.

The government reported that nationwide unemployment is down to 6.8 percent in the third quarter of 2012 from 7 percent in the second quarter of 2012.

We in the labor sector, of course, welcome this positive development, even as we urge the government to do more in order to ensure better wages and benefits for workers and invest more on skills training programs so that Filipino workers can get better jobs whether locally or overseas.

The government has to generate more quality jobs, as well as help more poor people qualify for these jobs. It can’t hand out dole-outs forever from the Conditional Cash-Transfer (CCT) Program to bail them out of dire straits. And it can’t just employ them to clean the streets for 100 days just to jack up the employment rate.

It is not just a matter of how many jobs are created. The focus should also be on how these jobs help alleviate the living condition of workers. How many of these new jobs are decent jobs? And do these economic gains this administration keeps harping on actually benefit the workers? Do they trickle down to uplift the lives of majority of our population who live in poverty?

I don’t know how much of the national budget is actually allocated for state-run training programs to address the perennial problem of skills mismatch, but that is where we should invest a lot of government money.

The government should accelerate training and re-training schemes to ensure that workers skills are constantly upgraded and can cope with the demands of international competition.

The training for middle-level manpower would also address the inefficiencies of the country’s education system, which tends to produce graduates who are more inclined towards the arts rather than technical and science-based courses. This is also being addressed through the “K to 12” program of the Education department.

This has been our rallying cry in the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines: reinforce the importance of education and skills upgrading.

The government wants to attract more foreign direct investments but the important thing to note is that we do not have enough skilled workers for all the investments we are trying to bring in.

There are new jobs available, certainly, in the Philippines’s highly labor-intensive BPO and IT-enabled services industry, which includes contact-center services; back offices; medical, legal and other data transcription; animation; software development; engineering design; and digital content.

Local business-process outsourcing firms are expected to generate more than 500,000 new jobs between 2013 and 2016. The country’s health-care outsourcing industry is seen to increase its dollar earnings by 56 percent to $433 million and expand its employee base to 43,000 this year. It is projected to hit $1 billion in revenues and 100,000 full-time employees by 2016.

The Business Processing Association of the Philippines projects the industry to yield up to $27 billion in annual revenues and directly employ some 1.3 million Filipinos by 2016.

There are other growth sectors as well. But we cannot fully take advantage of the opportunities because our workers and graduates lack the skills required for these jobs.

New jobs require new skills. New skills require training. Training requires investment in both time and money, from the government, from labor, from the employers.

In these volatile times, there is really no better safeguard for unemployment than having the right qualification and skills. And by having such, a Filipino worker can go after the most decent job available, not just the dangerous, the dirty, and the difficult ones.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.