The provincial government, under the leadership of Gov. Lilia “Nanay” Pineda, remains steadfast in its goal to become competitive service employment provider for domestic and manpower needs as well as for overseas placement of contract workers.
This was proven when the Public Employment Service Office of Pampanga bagged the hall fame or BEST PESO Award in Central Luzon for three consecutive years and Best PESO National for two years. Despite these awards, the province did not falter in its desire to create more new and timely programs to saturate every Kapampangan in search job opportunities down to grassroots level. Luningning Vergara, head of PESO Pampanga, said the province must have a data bank on the available manpower resources in the locality. This is an essential part of effective and efficient employment facilitation system, thus the birth of the Pampanga Skills Registry System (PSRS).
“In order to be familiar with the labor resources of the province, the PESO office instigated the creation of Skills Registry System that will identify the kind of workers that we have,” Vergara said.
PSRS is a skills mapping system with ultimate goal of establishing a data bank for the working population of the province. This new program gives a clear view of the manpower supply and demand in the province making it easy to match the requirement of locators vis-à-vis the qualification of workers and job seekers in the province.
PSRS, being the first and only localized version of Skills Registry System of the Department of Labor and Employment in the country got approval and support of Gov. Pineda. “Gov. Pineda is enthusiastic about the program. No other province has managed to create their own registry system because it is very expensive since it requires skills mapping,” Vergara added.
Under the registry system is the birth of the Pampanga Barangay PESO Coordinators in all 505 villages who are responsible in skills mapping, monitoring and updating of the data bank. Furthermore, all 20 municipalities were given their own computer to be used solely for PSRS encoding.
Now, with implementation of PSRS, PESO Pampanga is no longer dependent with trial and error method in estimating the labor resources in the market. The office is confident enough to say that programs and plans formulated under employment facilitation are more accurate and address the exact needs of the Kapampangan jobseekers and even other PPESO stakeholders.
The office has listed a total of 33, 500 workers under its data bank categorized in special occupation, officials of government and special interest organization, professionals, technician and associate professionals, laborers and unskilled workers, clerks, farmers, forestry workers and fishermen, trades and related workers, plant and machine operators and assemblers.
On its first year of operation of PSRS, PESO Pampanga had 5,944 job placements while on the second quarter of 2012 the job placement has already reached a total of 4,496 and still increasing because of local recruitment that gave job to 2,115 workers, special recruitment with 644 referrals and jobs fair that had assisted 8,581 jobseekers.
As a final stage in the execution of the program, every city and municipality of Pampanga will have its own PSRS CD containing the data or information about their labor resources that can be distributed or presented to locators who are looking for manpower services.
Monitoring and data updating is also part of PSRS to maintain LIVE data of labor market in Pampanga for an effective and efficient employment facilitation, pro-active livelihood assistance and continuous upgrading of available manpower for higher employability rate.
Under PSRS, PESO Pampanga is optimistic that, in three to five years, the province will be the Number One domestic and overseas employment provider in the country.
Moreover Pampanga Skills Registry System is an entry in PAGKILALA SA NATATANGING HUSAY NG PESO award of the Department of Labor and Employment that recognizes outstanding initiatives in implementing innovative employment-related programs.(Jenna V. Lumbang, PIO – Pampanga)
