THE Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) on Monday expressed confidence that its Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Development Alliance (AMDev) Program will boost efforts in tapping the Filipino workforce to strengthen the competencies of the country’s manufacturing sector.
“With around 790,000 Filipino graduates annually, companies should find it promising to readily recruit smart, young, and productive workforce for their manufacturing operations,” Trade Secretary Alfredo E. Pascual said at the launching of the AMDev Program on Monday.
The Trade chief also noted that advancing the country’s “workforce pipeline” is crucial to manufacturing development. The program is meant to improve the capacity of the education system to develop human capital aligned with the requirements of Industry 4.0. AMDev is a five-year (2022-2027) public-private partnership supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Unilab Foundation (ULF).
“It seeks to develop a highly skilled and adaptive workforce pipeline that meets the evolving requirements of the advanced manufacturing sector through better-defined, harmonized skills and qualifications descriptors, competency, and training standards,” DTI said in a statement on Monday.
In January, USAID inked a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with the ICCP Group Foundation, Inc. (ICCP) as one of the core partners for USAID’s AMDev Program.
The Trade department said part of AMDev is the establishment of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AMI) to be operationalized by Alliance Core Partners, namely Amherst Laboratories,Inc., Belmont Softgel Pharma Corporation, Fastech Advanced Assembly, and Western Digital.
Among DTI’s government partners are the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), Department of Finance (DOF), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Department of Science and Technology (DOST), and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
In pursuit of industrialization strategy, particularly adopting industry 4.0, the DTI underscored the importance of having a “highly skilled” workforce.
The agency said anew that it will soon launch an industry 4.0 pilot factory, which it said will house “cutting-edge” manufacturing technologies like advanced robotics, the Internet of things, and virtual and augmented reality simulations, among others.