IT Jobs for Jobless Nursing Grads?

CICT chief eyes IT jobs for Filipino nurses
By Yahoo! Southeast Asia Editors – August 12th, 2010


By Anna Valmero, loQal.ph

QUEZON CITY, METRO MANILA – Newly named Commission on Information Communications Technology (CICT) chief Ivan John Uy proposes a solution to employ the half a million jobless nursing graduates in the country: retool their skills to become IT-enabled medical transcriptionists.

“The lack of job opportunities for nurses in the country and abroad, after the boom six years ago, is an opportunity for the Philippines to fill in the demand for medical transcriptionists in the business process outsourcing industry, for example,” says Uy in an interview.

“The basic skills are there, you just need to retool that and make them more IT-enabled.”

Before assuming the chief post at CICT, Uy, a lawyer, formerly served as president of the Chief Information Officers (CIO) Forum and was a member of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Advisory Council that was instrumental in the May automated polls.

As CIO, he led the computerization program at the Supreme Court since the mid-1990s.

Uy explains there is a “mismatch” between the number of new graduates and current available jobs in the “knowledge” economy.

“Hundreds of thousands of nurses graduate annually when the demand has already shifted to knowledge-based services. That is why a lot of them are unemployed or if they work, they are underemployed as salespersons in malls.”

“Half a million graduates is a lot of untapped potential,” he says.

There are nursing graduates who pay as much as P20,000 for additional training in government and private hospitals to get better chances at being employed abroad, a hearing in the Lower House revealed on Thursday.

A three to six-month training program is enough to “retool” nursing skills and tailor-fit them to the job qualifications of medical transcriptionists, says Uy, who wants to tap the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to develop a curriculum for nurses who want to transition to medical transcriptionists.

After the TESDA training, he is looking at putting up a job fair to help employers recruit transcriptionists.

Meetings with industry groups such as Business Processing Association of the Philippines (B/PAP) are underway, says Uy, to tackle this issue and draft the country’s ICT roadmap for 2011 to 2015.

The local BPO industry posted $7.2 billion revenues in 2009, second to OFW remittances in terms of dollar sources for the country. This year, the sector is poised to grow at 25 percent to $9 billion, according to the B/PAP.

this is a very good plan,thanks for thinking and not just put to waste their skills

this is a very good plan,thanks for thinking and not just put to waste their skills

exactly

exactly

wow

samot jud sila ka chiks

we need male nurses as well

dugay naman na issue about medical transciptionist...mas nindot pa ni na job,,its like an online job...outsource ang job. US company  will hire people from Asian countries kay barato ang bayad

if i will be based there someday, motry gyud ko ug call center jobs