19 Million Filipinos Should Upskill to Survive Automation: McKinsey

As many as 19 million Filipinos need to sharpen their skills or learn new skills to survive the age of automation, according to the latest study by American management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

According to the Business World, a local news outlet, manufacturing, agriculture, retail, and wholesale sectors, are more prone to automation than others.

McKinsey Senior Partner Kaushik Das says automation may also lead to the creation of millions of new kinds of jobs. Therefore, the need of the hour is to learn the job that machines cannot do, he added.

This is bad news for the Philippines where the unemployment rate is already soaring at 10%. “It is important to re-skill millions of people, not a few thousand people,” reported the news outlet quoting Das as saying.

Meanwhile, the country’s BPO lobby group, the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) has reportedly stopped its reskilling program.

The lobby group has blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the destruction but added that it would resume the training program in the first month of 2021.

The program, announced in July, was originally designed to reskill two-thirds of the country’s BPO workforce.