Future-Ready Filipinos: Insights from the National Skills Summit
The recent National Skills Summit reinforced a collective call to action: to upskill Filipinos and better align their capabilities with the future of work. While the country reports a low unemployment rate of 4.1%, the deeper issue lies in underemployment and a persistent skills mismatch, affecting 14.6% of the workforce as of April 2025. Many Filipinos hold jobs that are unstable, low-paying, or misaligned with their training—revealing a growing disconnect between education outcomes and the evolving needs of industry.
Equipping the Future Workforce: What Employees and Employers Must Prepare Today
As industries continue to evolve under the influence of rapid technological change, both employees and employers face increasing pressure to adapt. Traditional workforce development strategies are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of the modern job market. In response, there’s a growing recognition that future-readiness requires parallel preparation on two fronts: individuals must build critical skills and mindsets, while organizations must redesign systems and strategies to support a more agile workforce.
1.) What Employees Need to Prepare or Build
Employees must actively invest in developing transversal skills—also known as transferable or cross-cutting skills—that remain essential regardless of role, industry, or technological shifts. According to LinkedIn (2024), the most in-demand skills include:
Beyond mastering these core skills, employees must also embrace a lifelong learning mindset. With job roles changing faster than traditional education systems can keep up, individuals need to pursue faster, stackable learning pathways that lead to job-ready outcomes. These can include certifications, micro-credentials, and immersive real-world experiences that equip workers to thrive in evolving roles.
Furthermore, employees must recognize where their current or desired roles fall within the broader labor market shift:
Disrupted jobs involve routine, repetitive tasks, and are increasingly vulnerable to automation.
Augmented jobs are evolving alongside AI and data systems, requiring new competencies and collaboration with technology.
Insulated jobs—often skilled trades or technical roles—are more resistant to disruption due to their hands-on nature.
Understanding these trends empowers individuals to proactively re-skill or pivot as needed to stay relevant.
2.) What Employers Need to Prepare to Ensure Organizational Readiness
Employers, on the other hand, must overhaul how they view talent and workforce development. The traditional reliance on degrees and formal qualifications is being replaced by a push toward skills-based hiring—a model that prioritizes demonstrated capabilities over credentials. This approach requires a fundamental shift in how organizations source, assess, and retain talent.
First, companies must invest in building learning ecosystems that are:
Flexible, offering short-form, job-relevant training programs
Real-world aligned, providing hands-on experiences that reflect workplace challenges
Continuous, enabling employees to upskill and reskill in an ongoing manner
Second, companies can shift to Skill-based hiring strategies to optimize how employers define, assess, and recognize talent—moving away from traditional credentials and toward demonstrated abilities and potential. A key insight emerging from recent workforce summits is clear: the speed at which job roles are changing now outpaces the ability of both individuals and institutions to adapt.
By aligning individual skill-building with organizational strategy, businesses and their people can co-create a more resilient, future-ready workforce. Here are ways how to shift to a skills-based hiring strategy:
Identification – Define Roles by Skills, Not Degrees. Focus job descriptions on key tasks, outcomes, and required skills—not just credentials—to attract more diverse and capable talent.
Sourcing – Tap into Non-Traditional Talent Pools. Broaden recruitment to include vocational grads, bootcamp completers, gig workers, and remote talent to fill hard-to-find skill gaps.
Pool Development – Build and Maintain Agile Talent Pipelines. Enhance your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and invest in digital platforms to manage a centralized, skills-verified talent pool across teams.
Assessment – Equip Managers for Skills-Based Evaluation. Train hiring managers to use simulations, work samples, and behavior-based assessments, especially for emerging or technical roles.
Selection – Leverage AI for Smarter, more Objective Hiring. Use AI and talent marketplaces to match candidates’ skills to roles more accurately and inclusively, reducing bias and improving fit.
At the same time, our educational institutions must adopt a mindset of responsiveness and flexibility. Programs must be faster, more relevant, and designed for lifelong learning. This includes creating stronger connections between academe and industry, encouraging real-world learning opportunities early on, and preparing students to navigate constant change with confidence.
Final Thoughts
As the Philippine economy moves toward a digital-first—and heavily tech-dependent—future, the country must rapidly bridge its skills gap. Perhaps the most critical insight is this: AI and automation are not threats to fear—they are realities to prepare for. Embracing AI literacy is not just about mastering new tools but about cultivating curiosity, resilience, and the ability to adapt. The Filipino workforce has the talent and potential—we just need the right systems and leadership to unlock it.
As someone deeply engaged in HR and talent development, I left the summit with a stronger sense of urgency. The future of work is already here—and how we respond today will shape not only our employment landscape, but also our long-term economic resilience and social equity.
References:
Dan Brodnitz, Head of Global Content of LinkedIn Learning, 2024
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