8 Reasons to Consider the Vocational or TVL Track in Senior High

But how can TVL Senior High graduates be sure they could get employed after senior high? Well, according to the Official Gazette, the official journal of the Republic of the Philippines:

DepEd has entered into an agreement with business organizations, local and foreign chambers of commerce, and industries to ensure that graduates of K to 12 will be considered for employment.

There will be a matching of competency requirements and standards so that 12-year basic education graduates will have the necessary skills needed to join the workforce and to match the College Readiness Standards for further education and future employment.

Entrepreneurship will also be fostered in the enhanced curriculum, ensuring graduates can venture into other opportunities beyond employment.

After the TVL Track in senior high, you can get employed by a company or can be self-employed because of the skills you’ve acquired.

If you have no desire to go to college and simply want to earn money to support yourself and your family right after high school, the TVL track is the best option. It will let you do that.

Conversely, if you do want to go to college – immediately after senior high or eventually, after some time – the TVL track still makes sense. You can use the skills you’ve acquired through the TVL Track to earn money for college.

This statistic was part of the Commission on Higher Education or CHED’s 2008 data, as cited in the explanatory note for the Free College Entrance Exam Act. To quote,

Based on the Commission’s 2008 data, out of 100 Grade 1 pupils, only 66 finish Grade 6 and only 58 of them enroll in first year high school. Of the 58, only 43 finish high school. However, only 23 of the 43 who finished high school enroll in college and only 14 of the 23 eventually graduate from a college.

Fourteen out of every hundred Grade 1 pupils – that’s incredibly low! In other words, we have an extremely high attrition rate  – 86% – in our formal education system.

This 2008 data is borne out by recent CHED graduation statistics. For the Academic Year 2010-2011, the Higher Education Graduation Rate (i.e. the percentage of 1st year baccalaureate students able to graduate) is 56.75%. In other words, only a little over half of those who enroll in first year college get to graduate.

What this means:

College is not for everyone. While everyone may want to go to college – and that’s highly improbable – of those who do want to go to college, not everyone can or will be able to do so.

To be sure, the idea of going to college must seem more attractive than technical-vocational options. However, the reality is that less than half of Grade 1 pupils actually survive high school, only less than a quarter even attempt to go to college, and only around 14% of those originally in grade 1 survive college to graduate. Further proof that not everyone will or can go to and graduate from college.

Before senior high school, give yourself an honest assessment. Answer this question; is college really for you? If you think you can’t or won’t be able to go to college – much less graduate college – then you have another option: the technical-vocational route.

In that case, the TVL Track of senior high makes better sense than the academic track.

If, after assessing yourself according to the three criteria mentioned above, you realize that college is not for you, then your senior high track should be obvious. The TVL Track is offered to provide inclusive growth and development opportunities for those to whom college is not the right path.

Then, a 2008 discussion paper assessing basic education in the Philippines, using 2002 and 2004 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS), indicates that high cost of education is one of the reasons primary (14.8%) and secondary (27.4%) school students are not in school. Another significant reason, especially among secondary school students, is employment or looking for work (12.5%).

The authors also suppose that, for some of the survey subjects, “Lack of personal interest” could actually be a euphemism for lack of financial resources. Some of the survey respondents could have stated lack of personal interest as their reason for not being in school because they had not wanted to admit that lack of financial resources is the reason they were not in school. To support this hypothesis, the study points to data that shows the percentage of primary and secondary school age children not in school decreases with household income.

In fact, further exploration of the 2002 and 2004 APIS data shows that an average of 69.5% of those in the primary age group who were not attending school and an average of 62.8% of those in the secondary age group who were not attending school belong to the bottom 30% of the income distribution.

This means that a lot of Filipinos drop out of elementary school and high school because they do not have the financial resources to stay in school. It is logical to suppose, therefore, that a lot of Filipinos are likely not attending college, cannot stay in college or will not even try for college because of economic reasons.

If you are one of the many for whom going to college seems like an insurmountable feat because you lack the financial resources to do so, the TVL Track is a viable solution. After TVL senior high, if all you wanted to do is work and earn money to support yourself and your family, you can. If what you want to do is go to college, you still can. Use your TVL Track to gain skills you can use to work and earn money, then use the money to pay for college.

Will it be hard? Of course it will be. But at least the TVL Track now gives you another option aside from simply quitting school because you don’t have the financial means to go to college anyway. It also gives you better employment options; after senior high – when you join the workforce – you will have skills that the labor force market actually values and can actually use.

You see, based on the 2014 Survey on Overseas Filipinos (SOF), out of the Overseas Filipino Workers surveyed:

• 32.8% are in labor and unskilled occupations
• 12.8% are in trade or related work
• 12.5% are plant and machine operators and assemblers
• 16.5% are in the service, shop and market sales industry

In total, that’s 74.6% of the OFWs surveyed. That’s the bulk of the occupations waiting for Filipino workers abroad!

Even if we randomly halve the percentage for the service, shop and market sales industry (supposing half of the jobs in this sector probably require a college degree), still around 66.5% of the OFWs surveyed occupy positions that TVL senior high school graduates will be better equipped to fill – especially upon gaining some on-the-job experience during and after senior high school.

If your goal is to work abroad, then the TVL Track senior high can be an efficient shortcut.

The table above shows that most Filipinos are employed in the TVL sector abroad, so why not use your time in senior high to acquire the skills you’ll need for overseas employment later on?

According to former Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) Director General, Joey Villanueva (as cited in a 2013 article published on The Philippine Star),

… a great bulk of those who took vocational training courses and certification with the agency for the past years were college graduates and professionals.

College graduates and professionals take up vocational training courses to gain national certifications for technical skills required for employment, specially employment overseas. Villanueva cites examples like nurses taking up a course in medical transcription and electrical engineers taking up an electric installer course.

Even if you want to finish college, earn a degree and become a professional, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to choose the Academic Track in senior high. This is especially true if you want a career in ICT or engineering later on, where certain skills certifications are deemed enormously valuable.

Indeed, it all boils down to the fact that you need skills – preferably certified – in order to be gainfully employed. Even college graduates need such skills. So why not use your time in senior high school to acquire them?

For this reason, the TVL Track is a great option. TESDA training courses are integrated into the TVL Track. So while in senior high, you can gain the requisite COCs (Certificates of Competency) and NCs (National Certifications) that will enhance your employability later on. So right out of senior high, you’d have the certifications that would land you the better jobs.

According to Department of Labor and Employment or DOLE Sec. Rosalinda Dimapilis-Baldoz, there’s a high unemployment rate among the youth (age 15-24) in the Philippines.

Almost half of the Philippines’ unemployed are the youth, aged 15 to 24 years old. The April 2015 LFS still validates this, with our youth unemployment rate still more than twice the national rate.

The TVL Track in senior high could change this. A TVL Track senior high graduate is supposed to have employable skills, and the skills he or she will learn in senior high are actually aligned with the demands of the labor force market. Again, according to Sec. Dimapilis-Baldoz,

In an era of regional and global integration, the labor market offers opportunities to senior high school graduates here in the Philippines and in many parts of the world. Our JobsFit Report, 2013-20120, tells us a number of in-demand and hard-to-fill occupations for TVET graduates. On its part, the Phil-JobNet, the government’s official job portal, registers thousands of occupations needing graduates of TESDA courses with national certifications…

… There is an overall positive outlook for the Philippine labor market in the area of agribusiness, construction, manufacturing, and services sectors.

If you don’t want to be another unemployed statistic, you must consider the TVL Track. The TVL Track really is the best preparation for those whose priority is finding work after senior high graduation.

To date, the following are some of the planned or ongoing infrastructure construction in Naga (taken from a Bicol Mail article last February):

• a new 5-storey building near the JMR Coliseum to house an additional 3,000 more slots for IBM
• Robinsons Place Naga to feature a BPO Center with its own building adjacent to the mall
• SM City Naga to construct an additional 9-storey building at an adjacent lot with four floors allocated for BPO locators

This tells us two things. The most obvious is that Naga City is gradually transforming into a BPO hub that will employ thousands of agents. The second but perhaps less obvious is that in Naga, there is and there will be great demand for skilled construction workers.

Current construction activities in Naga is already employing many construction workers. If the BPO industry  in Naga continues to thrive, more BPO players will come and more buildings will need to be built to house these new players. Then of course, as a result of greater BPO opportunities in Naga, a lot of people from surrounding areas are likely to move here. This means there will be greater demand for housing, housing that – again – will need to be built.

As a result of all these current and projected construction activities, TVL Track senior high graduates (especially those who chose a senior high school that teaches construction-relevant skills such as construction painting, tile-setting and masonry) in Naga City can be fairly certain that jobs will be available in Naga after graduation.

This means that after TVL Track senior high, you 1) can be fairly certain that there will be employment opportunities waiting for you, and 2) you won’t have to leave Naga to take advantage of such employment opportunities.

What if you don’t necessarily want to work in construction? Well after the TVL Track in senior high, you could continue on to take a TESDA call center training course and get the proficiency required to work as a call center agent. This way, right after senior high school and 100 hours of skills training, you can be gainfully employed in the BPO sector.