MIT’s Global Opportunity Forum joins new $5 million program to develop advanced manufacturing skills in the Philippines
January 18, 2023
As the world undergoes “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” workforce education has often been slow to catch up. This is a problem nearly everywhere—including the Philippines.
“We have a constant shortage of engineers, chemists, pharmacists—you name it,” said Limuel L. Razo, Corporate Vice President of United Laboratories, at the recent Integrated STEM Leadership Summit and Global Opportunity Forum (GOF) Southeast Asia launch in Manila.
United Laboratories, also known as Unilab, is the largest pharmaceutical company in the Philippines. And it is not alone in its plight. Filipino businesses struggle to find skilled workers across industries, but especially in advanced manufacturing—manufacturing with cutting-edge technologies AI and advanced robotics.
The GOF, launched within MIT’s Office of Open Learning, is collaborating with the Unilab Foundation and a team of employers and educators to address this issue. The collaboration will help close the skills gap in the Philippines with a $5 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The USAID grant, awarded in August 2022, will fund a program called the Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Development System (AMWDS), which will build adaptable and resilient workforce pipelines for advanced manufacturing in the Philippines, focusing largely on upskilling existing workers. The USAID grant funds the AMWDS for five years.
The AMWDS team will develop education and training programs specifically designed for the needs of the Philippines. The team will identify advanced manufacturing skills that workers and companies need, and develop learning modules to train up to ten thousand incumbent workers for better roles in Philippine manufacturing businesses.
The GOF brings expertise from MIT Open Learning and previous experience with workforce training programs for advanced manufacturing in the U.S. Since 2020, experts on the GOF’s team have worked with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to create an advanced-manufacturing training program in the state called MassBridge. Funded by a U.S. Department of Defense grant, the program was created, according to the Massachusetts Center for Advanced Manufacturing, to “serve as a national model.”
Like many USAID-funded programs, AMWDS aims to spark sustainable and inclusive economic development in the Philippines. Not only is AMWDS expected both to increase advanced manufacturing capacity. It is also expected to secure good jobs for more Filipinos and retain manufacturing in the archipelago nation.
Across the world, new technologies and methods—sometimes collectively known as “Industry 4.0”—have begun to transform both how and where the world makes things. Because new manufacturing tech reduces the need for low-skill labor, as machines take on more and more tasks, some manufacturing has become susceptible to “reshoring”—in which manufacturing facilities return to advanced economies, where highly skilled labor is easier to find.
But programs to build skilled workforces, like AMWDS, can help manufacturing in nations like the Philippines remain competitive and secure good-paying and fulfilling work, even as manufacturing becomes more technologically advanced and requires higher skills.
Advanced manufacturing jobs, which tend to pay well, could improve incomes for many Filipinos. The USAID classifies the Philippines as a “Lower Middle-Income Country,” the second lowest among four income categories established by the World Bank. Countries in this category have gross national incomes per capita (GDP plus income earned from work and investments abroad, divided by total population) between $1,086 to $4,255.
The GOF program marks a new chapter in MIT Opening Learning, extending MIT’s knowledge about workforce learning across the globe and offering hope for a brighter economic future for workers in the Philippines and beyond.
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