Skills Registry System gets huge welcome in Tacurong

(Tacurong City-March 22, 2012) - If one hundred percent attendance to the Skills Registry System (SRS) orientation was any indication, Tacurong City gave an impression that the program gets big support from its barangay officials.

Officials of all the twenty barangays of Tacurong, led by their respective chairperspons, attended the one-day SRS orientation conducted by the Department of Labor and Employment Regional Office 12 on February 28, 2012.

One of the flagship programs of President Noynoy Aquino, the SRS is a nationwide manpower skills registration system which provides adequate and available supply of labor. DOLE is the implementing agency of the program in partnership with Public Employment Service Offices (PESO) of Local Government Units (LGU).

DOLE Sultan Kudarat Field Office organized the SRS orientation, which also signaled the launching of the program in Tacurong City. City Mayor Lina Montilla and Sangguniang Panlungsod Labor and Employment Committee Chairperson Benjamin Fajardo Jr. joined the participants in the said activity.

Newly-installed DOLE 12 Director Chona Mantilla and Assistant Regional Director Yahya Senti also arrived and greeted the participants. Director Mantilla, in her message, even commended the barangay officials for their one hundred percent attendance to the orientation.

Essentially, SRS reduces job search period and increases the employability of workers and jobseekers looking for opportunities without really going through the tiring process of personally knocking at the employers’ doors.

            Supervising Labor and Employment Officer Evelyn Libot of DOLE 12, one of the lecturers of the orientation, emphasized the significance of the SRS to the barangays saying that jobseekers from these areas are the farthest from the radar of the employers.

“Through SRS, the government is bridging the gap between the jobseekers and the employers as well as address the problem of jobs mismatch”, Libot said. She added that, in SRS, the data of a jobseeker is encoded in the software and after which, all data are uploaded to the PhilJobnet website for online perusal of employers.

Meanwhile, the barangay officials who attended the orientation were very receptive to the SRS program. Barangay Tina Chairperson Maria Lourdes Bogador hopes that the SRS would truly address the problem of unemployment in her barangay. “Since many of our skilled workers do not have access to computer and the internet, the SRS will be a great help for our unemployed constituents”, she said.

Provision of desktop computer for SRS

Lending credence to its goal of effectively implementing SRS, DOLE 12 provided PESO-Tacurong City one unit of desktop computer. The computer will be used for encoding the jobseekers’ information using the SRS offline skills registration. The offline data will be sent to the DOLE for online posting using the PhilJobnet.

Mayor Montilla, who personally received the computer, acknowledged the seriousness of the DOLE to implement the SRS by supplementing the system with the hardware and software. “You would not provide complete tools to your partner if you do not want a guarantee for the success of the program. I’m convinced that the DOLE is serious and we need to give our commitment to the SRS program”, Mayor Montilla said. Likewise, the mayor encouraged the barangay officials to actively support SRS in their areas by tenjoining all their skilled workers to register. (Allan Freno)