Tech-Voc Career Accelerator

Tech-Voc Career Accelerator upskills Filipino youth NEET to employment through low-bandwidth gamified learning and online training developed with industry employers.

1 in 5 Filipino youth is not in education, employment and training (NEET). Financial challenges, familial responsibilities and time poverty are factors that a young person considers prior to pursuing tertiary education. 

Tech-voc offers a neat solution to this problem.

It is a cost-effective solution that leads to employment in lucrative, skill-based careers. 

Although Edukasyon.ph sees this as a clear solution, and thousands of schools offer tech-voc certifications often subsidized by the government, tech-voc continues to be less popular than college in the Philippines on top of being stigmatized as a low-ranking pathway for young people. 

Our years of experience in promoting tech-voc and making it attractive for the Filipino youth have led us to our solution -- Tech-Voc Career Accelerator, a digitally-enabled and low-bandwidth learning-to-employment program for youth NEET; pushing them to employment, and stopping them from falling behind in education-to-career journey.

In this program, the youth will discover tech-voc as a viable education pathway towards a successful future. They will be trained in soft and technical skills through low-bandwidth, gamified curriculum-based learning, then coursed through further training and certification opportunities before being connected to hiring employers.

With Tech-Voc Career Accelerator Program, more than 40,000 youth NEET will be upskilled with tech-voc soft and technical skills in 2022. By 2026, over 200,000 will be highly employable tech-voc professionals filling the job market.

With the mutual issues faced by TVET in Southeast Asia, our solution’s versatile model and localized approach can create similar ripples of change in our neighboring countries.

An unsuccessful transition from education to employment is becoming a common trend for young people in the Philippines due to financial difficulties leading to school dropouts and job skills mismatch. Rising dropout rates and high youth unemployment are negative consequences from lack of quality and accessible education in the Philippines. With the COVID-19 pandemic, 3 million students have dropped out of school while youth unemployment continues to rise from 15.7% last year to 19% in 2021 -- both of which can be attributed to financial incapacity and job skills mismatch. Without any intervention, the youth NEET will continue to face economic and systemic challenges hindering their education. Sadly, more Filipino youth will continue assuming that there are no other viable options for them.

Technical-Vocational education offers a neat solution -- it is a cost-effective way to upskill youth NEET addressing financial constraints, increase their employability which is considerably impacted by their education inactivity, and eventually fill a growing demand for specialized roles in the workforce--uplifting their status and wellbeing, and granting them economic empowerment. However, decades after the creation of a formal TVET governing body, tech-voc still struggles to take off, despite the dominant presence of 4,540 tech-voc institutions compared to 1,963 colleges & universities in the Philippines. Clearly, we need to maximize the benefits of TVET with tech-voc education and training readily available in the country. This then unveils the lack of awareness and promotion of TVET which is another layer of problem attached to tech-voc's stigmatized reputation.

Tech-Voc Career Accelerator serves Filipino youth not in education, employment and training (NEET), two-thirds of which come from families on the bottom of the economic ladder. Being a youth NEET loses their ability to participate in employment and enhance their socio-economic standing due to lack of skills and qualifications. Unsurprisingly, the majority of youth NEET in the Philippines are found in conflict-affected and regional areas (e.g. BARMM, Northern Mindanao), where economic opportunities are scarce and unstable. Despite the growing youth NEET population, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies establishes that unique solutions addressing their challenges are yet to receive proper attention from the Philippine government, academe and private sector, specifically on the intersectionality of issues faced by 20-24 year old female NEETs who make up more than one-third of the NEET population.

Financial challenges are the main concerns of youth NEET, thus, our solution will provide free and accessible quality learning on tech-voc soft and technical skills. Lacking awareness on TVET and its advantages causes low uptake among the youth, so our solution will bring information to youth NEET and shift the status quo on TVET. Low confidence prevails among youth NEET, which also influences their ability to access education and support. Therefore, a major pillar of our solution is combining holistic skills development with industry training to build confidence through learning connections and linkages. To end, our solution will see youth NEET enrolling into training/certification and eventually landing employment, which fundamentally uproots them from their NEET status. 

Our innovative digital solution addresses the lagging transition from education to employment of the underserved youth NEET in the Philippines, who lack financial resources to afford quality education and suitable skills to participate in employment. With the alarming rate of youth unemployment caused by the pandemic, we see millions of young people who require restarting their education or training, and re-skilling to be able to rejoin the workforce. This is where Tech-Voc Career Accelerator steps in to bridge youth NEET to TVET and employment pathways relevant to the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) digital technologies--ensuring their skills and training are future-proof. Our solution goes beyond simply just re-directing them to education/training. Our solution prepares youth NEET prior to their re-entry into education, employment and training by equipping them with technical and 21st century skills such as complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence--all relevant to the in-demand skills of the future of work. Tech-Voc Career Accelerator utilizes accessible quality learning opportunities through digital gamified learning accessed via a mobile-compatible website to deliver skills capacity-building to Filipino youth, and virtual models of workshops and mentorship to gain industry-relevant technical skills. All of which only require low-bandwidth internet, and in some cases do not require cost thanks to our active partnership with a major telecom in the Philippines providing free data access to subscribers. Our solution leverages digital delivery of the end-to-end student journey of upskilling, training and certification to allow accessibility to skilled learning in the time of pandemic-induced movement restrictions.

The Team Lead for our solution is Patricia Matias, our Vice President for Partnerships in Edukasyon.ph.

Our unique solution endorses technical-vocational education as an economical and accessible approach to push back Filipino youth NEET into education, employment and/or training. In a country that prioritizes college degrees over vocational education, and perceives TVET as the last resort for education/training, our innovation aims to change the culture and norms toward the stigmatized tech-voc and redirect youth NEET into employment through a combination of our gamified edtech products (e.g. Quest) and digital services (e.g. campaign, workshops, mentorship, training/scholarship opportunities).

Our solution takes along youth NEET into a journey of (1) changing their perceptions on tech-voc and discovering TVET as their education option, (2) upskilling holistic soft and technical skills through gamified curriculum-based Employability Soft Skills Quests, (3) hands-on training via a tech-voc industry online bootcamp, and (4) continuous learning via a training or certification route leading to immediate employment. We are carrying out the mutual success learning of South Korea and Germany’s TVET implementation, which zeroes in on strong industry partnerships integrated in the early stage of education/training. Our solution involves industry cooperation in co-developing the soft and technical skills learning to close the job skills mismatch gap afflicting the youth.  

The Tech-Voc Career Accelerator will lead underserved youth NEET to unfilled high-demand roles by offering them an affordable education through accessible low-bandwidth edtech solutions. We are not starting from scratch, instead we are leveraging the existing base of 4,540 TVET institutions along with the increasing demand of businesses for tech-voc graduates.

The Tech-Voc Career Accelerator is a combination of multiple high-impact initiatives of Edukasyon that were tested in previous project iterations. Our solution will be an extension of our initial study on norms and perceptions prevailing TVET supported by our partnership with Australia DFAT’s Investing in Women. Our findings led us to designing evidence-based campaigns to break gender stereotypes in TVET. We also have tested curriculum-based soft skills online modules developed with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and eTESDA, which can be applied to our solution. 

With our collaboration with the Asian Development Bank, we have developed a ladderized curriculum-based online modules on basic education subjects that incorporate e-learning Guerra level 3 interaction. Our gamified Quests, a pioneering incentivized learning product in the Philippines and used as the main asynchronous activity for our education advocacy learning programs cover topics on effective communication, resume-building, and goal-setting among others. 

Our solution utilizes Edukasyon.ph's Quest and Rewards, a gamified learning platform which packages learning in bite-sized modules leading to experience points (measuring progress) and EduCoins (measuring completion). Both are used to redeem rewards (e.g. gift certificates, mobile data). Our platform has exhibited good uptake among users, with 238,000+ Quests started and 102,000+ Quests completed since its launch in March 2020. The platform boasts a completion rate of >43%, higher than the 10-15% global average for online course completion. We attribute its success to three levers:

1. Low bandwidth - Our mobile-friendly low-bandwidth Quests are accessible to 74.1% of the population who use low-cost smartphones. Our exclusive, first of its kind (for PH edtech) free data partnership with Globe, the Philippines’ leading telecommunications company with 77 million mobile subscribers, also contributes to its accessibility.

2. Localized content - Our Quests are made with our learners’ context in mind — using a mix of English and Filipino, bite-sized to fit mobile, and delivered in different formats to cover various learning needs.

3. Gamification - The gamified delivery increases engagement and encourages retention. Our partnership with brands and employers keep our gamification feature cost-effective and value-driven: students, especially those in need, are partly motivated by sponsored products and potential employment.

Our platform application leverages cloud technologies offered by Amazon Web Services, in which the cost-efficient serverless approach for our APIs is implemented using microservice architecture. AWS has been our partner since 2018, and we expect continued support from them for this initiative.

Our vision for the solution is to create a workforce of young skilled professionals who successfully transition to lucrative careers in technical-vocational fields. This will be achieved guided by our theory of change that first measures and captures the perception, norms and behavior change towards tech-voc and the change in confidence and aspirational levels among youth. With 73% of Filipino families favoring college education, we want to measure the shift of education preference from college to TVET in our communities--generated from the solution’s campaign awareness drives. The long-term outcome is demonstrated in Filipino youth confidently pursuing tech-voc pathway as their first education option given its positive and uplifted reputation in the Philippines.

Knowledge and practice gained on employability soft and technical skills serve as success indicators--leading towards the achieved long-term outcome of tech-voc jobs being filled by Filipino youth workforce. Further, a high level of acquired knowledge on industry standards and demands, employment opportunities, and professional development pathways will result in the youth’s accelerated education-to-employment transition. Youth who fully transition to employment will be measured based on ILO’s school-to-work transition definition, which accounts for employment lasting 12 months. The transition duration will also be captured using TESDA’s data of 97.8% of TVET graduates landing jobs within 6 months or less as baseline. Gained knowledge and skills will be attributed from the Employability Soft Skills Quests and Online Bootcamp with industry partner activities. 

Another long-term outcome is manifested in the decreased rate of youth unemployment due to job skills mismatch, and Filipino youth employed in appropriate jobs that match their skills-level and expertise. Through our activity of linking youth with continuous learning opportunities like training/certification and employment pathways, students will identify appropriate education, training and/or career pathways aligned with their interests and skills. A success indicator is the number of youth who have completed the program and afterwards enrolled in education, training or certification post-program. Long-term, we want to capture the total number of youth who have secured employment after accomplishing Tech-Voc Career Accelerator, and enrolled in any form of education, training or certification after the program. 

The solution involved TVET industry employers who will be closely engaged to co-develop and deliver industry-relevant Tech-Voc Career Accelerator to youth NEET.

Our solution will be measured using Edukasyon’s standard evaluation system that measures 1) reach and engagement, 2) change in mindset and skill-level, 3) number of program completion including Quest completers, and 4) post-program outcomes such as employment rate. We use campaign metrics via Facebook and Google Analytics including impressions, reach and engagement as key performance indicators to measure the overall effectiveness of our digital campaigns, which will be similarly employed in our solution. Part of measuring our solution’s learning outcomes is measuring the change in mindset and/or skill-level which will be identified via pre- and post-surveys as well as Quest assessment tools for knowledge check. An Edukasyon strength in our programs is obtaining high completion rates of online learning materials that are regularly monitored for consistent data reporting. Hence, for this solution, a total number of Quest completions will be identified as final KPI to indicate success at the end of the program. The KPI will be determined in parallel with the going standard rate of Quest completions in Edukasyon. The post-program outcomes (e.g. employment rate, enrollment in TVET course) are determined via close monitoring of participants beyond the program. In addition to post-surveys, we distribute monitoring short survey/feedback forms, conduct FGDs and one-on-one interviews to identify post-program outcome milestones achieved by participants. All of our qualitative findings are analyzed using a qualitative data analysis tool (e.g. Nvivo) supplementing the quantitative data gathered in the program.

With Tech-Voc Career Accelerator, we are working towards upskilling over 40,000 Filipino youth with employability skills and 4,000 students receiving industry-led technical training by 2022, enabling them to demonstrate competitive skills set and lay the foundation for their future career. We are projecting a yearly impact of upskilling at least 40,000 youth NEET. By 2024, we are set to build a workforce of over 120,000 youth with in-demand technical and soft skills, and create a community of 200,000 highly employable technically-trained tech-voc young professionals that match the labor market demand by 2026. 

Our solution is deliberately designed with versatility to repeat the program in cycles with various technical-vocational industries in 4IR sectors. In the first year, we will work with 10 tech-voc companies, and 50 companies by 2026. 

We also recognize the replicability of our solution to other Southeast Asian countries, where we see an increasing trend of youth NEET since 2012. In 2021, 24.6% of youth in Asia and the Pacific are NEET. Low quality TVET education and poor perceived image are common challenges experienced across Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Our solution can be replicated in these countries who are equally fighting youth unemployment and require quality TVET graduates for their workforce. Other countries may be able to adapt the program model to match the needs of its language, culture, and employment. The digital and low-bandwidth nature of the Quests and Online Bootcamps allows for easy scalability provided that necessary adaptations are made.

Product

Though Edukasyon’s Quest is an established edtech product, we still require continuous development to improve user experience. We hope to integrate a more sophisticated ladderized curriculum to effectively generate and assess learning outcomes. To ensure an increasing uptake, we will work with industry partners to design online modules that instruct industry-aligned skills demand. We will also maximize our 832,000 registered users to facilitate a comprehensive user testing experience.

Financing

Tech-Voc Career Accelerator is in its pilot stage and requires sufficient seed funding to build an operational foundation. We are able to overcome this potential barrier by leveraging the gains from Edukasyon's profitable B2B business and tapping existing partnerships with corporations.

Cultural

Our TVET research and analysis of previous IEC campaigns led us to affirm that there is cultural stigma associated with TVET and ‘blue-collar’ jobs, which clouds the fact that tech-voc is a financially viable education option. Even among employers, college qualifications are more weighted than TVET’s skills-based certifications, prompting disqualification of tech-voc graduates in certain jobs. 

We have a solid understanding of the TVET landscape aided by previous research and past tech-voc projects in partnership with TESDA, TVET institutions and industry employers. Our existing relationship with these TVET players has given us a voice to initiate cultural change across the academe and industry. There is also an increasing market and intervention demand as the government is encouraged by international development organizations (e.g. ADB, ILO) to focus on TVET and Industry 4.0. 

Edukasyon.ph is the largest edtech platform in the Philippines empowering 8 million Gen Z students aged 13 to 24 to explore within reach and learn with purpose. Launched in 2015, students use our low-bandwidth website to gain access to schools, scholarships, and other resources that enable them to make self-aware education decisions that lead to a fulfilling career and life. 

The K-12 shift, which left millions of SHS students with insufficient support, prompted Edukasyon to bridge the information gap by creating a one-stop search-and-apply platform in 2016 offering localized SHS information becoming their go-to platform reaching 1M users the year after. By 2018 we scaled our reach by onboarding college information and resources. Working with students over the years and growing our student base to 5M by 2019, we identified their requirement of holistic skills development and continuous learning. This prompted us to rework our vision and the platform’s student journey experience. Today, our users are guided by a 4-step structured learning journey designed by the Career Development Association of the Philippines (CDAP): Know Myself, Explore My Options, Learn New Skills, and Start My Career. 

Having successfully built a SHS and college platform, we recognize not all Filipino youth will resonate with the given pathways and resources. Specifically, youth NEET whose needs and circumstances do not align with the mainstream education system, and more with TVET. Thus, our aim of building an inclusive platform that prioritizes specialized upskilling for youth NEET has led us to designing Tech-Voc Career Accelerator. 

Our solution team consists of 8 full-time staff coming from different departments in Edukasyon. 

1. Patricia Matias, Vice President for Partnerships

2. Regina Agustin, Senior Partnerships Manager

3. Henry Motte-Munoz, Founder

4. Grace David, CEO

5. Zennon Gosalvez, Head of Product

6. TJ Policarpio, Head of Engineering

7. Isabel Sarrosa, Partnerships Associate 

8. Madel Asuncion, Multimedia Specialist

Our team is experienced in the Philippine development sector with combined 5 years of experience developing low-bandwidth, high quality edtech products adapted to the local demand and needs. Our Project and Partnerships Managers are highly skilled in program design, research & analysis in areas of education, skills development, and gender with a proven track record of delivering campaigns, online workshops, and developing curriculum-based online materials. Edukasyon.ph consists of a dedicated marketing and creatives team, a tech team of full-stack developers, and an EdTech Specialist responsible for our tech solutions with intuitive UI/UX design. Our organization is made up of 68% youth allowing us to incorporate the Filipino youth perspective in our solution design and execution.

Our previous partnerships with civil society organizations like YouthWorks, who work directly with youth NEET communities, guide us in working with our target audience and recruiting them into specialized TVET programs for NEETs. Our learnings from past experiences on localizing interventions to suit the needs and circumstances of our audience is manifested in our localized Filipino-language career readiness online modules and low-bandwidth edtech curriculum online modules. 

Further, we designed our solution guided by the evaluation findings coming from existing interventions on learning design and development. We have affirmed the existence of cultural stigma against tech-voc and the issues that youth face with their influencers when pursuing TVET. Thus, we are more than conscious of injecting these insights not only into the solution design, but also to the rest of Edukasyon’s programs.

Patricia Matias is the Vice President of Partnerships at Edukasyon.ph, leading a team of 16 in the sole revenue-generating department of the company. Under her leadership, the team drove its highest quarter of revenue performance in company history (42% YoY). Prior to her promotion as VP, her leadership in the Education and Social Development Partnerships teams greatly contributed to the B2B department’s first gross profit in 2020.

Beyond ensuring financial sustainability, Patricia leads the technical design, fundraising, project management, and monitoring and evaluation of Edukasyon.ph’s key education technology development programs in partnership with local and international institutions such as TESDA, ADB, World Bank, USAID, and Australia DFAT. She championed Edukasyon.ph’s focus on technical-vocational education in 2019 and penned the winning plan for Yaring Pinay, an Australia DFAT-funded project aiming to funnel and support women in male-dominated TVET courses. The multi-year project was awarded the UN Women 2021 Philippine WEPs Awards SME Champion in Community Engagement and Partnerships. Amid the pandemic, Patricia pushed to accelerate digital learning tools for K-12 and TVET, raising funds from the ADB and ILO to convert paper-based modules into interactive online courses for last-mile K-12 schools and ICT-related tech-voc courses.

In partnership with DFAT’s Investing in Women, we are delivering a year-long digital campaign on dismantling gender stereotypes in TVET. We are also working with the ILO and eTESDA to develop learning modules on online job readiness for women in STEM. Further, we are in a tripartite partnership with the ADB, NIRAS and Philippine Business for Social Progress to develop low-cost edtech solutions of online modules and LMS for last mile schools in the Philippines. 

For our solution, we are working with TESDA, the Philippine’s governing agency for TVET, on Edukasyon's existing tech-voc projects, which gives us access to understanding issues and needs of the TVET sector, and how such insights can help us re-angle TVET as the solution for youth NEET who are without access to affordable education.

As the leading youth platform in the Philippines, we are connected with 800 schools and universities in the country and abroad, with their school and course information available on the website. Further, our exclusive partnership with Globe, the largest telecommunications company in the Philippines allows free data access to Edukasyon.ph including Quest & Rewards and learning materials for online users--the first edtech platform to be selected for this deal.

To be awarded as a Challenge Winner will tremendously help the team lay the operational groundwork for the multi-year delivery of Tech-Voc Career Accelerator. A partnership with Octava and MIT Solve will, firstly, upskill the Edukasyon team with the right strategy and approach to refine our main edtech product offering (Quest) that features appropriate learning design and assessment tools. What we need is technical expertise on how to redesign our gamified, ladderized module framework that will effectively measure learning outcomes of users. 

Second, our solution requires better assessment of the most viable business model that will complement its scaling and sustainability. We are well-versed in engaging B2B, however, we still lack experience in growing our B2C revenue activities. Recognizing that we will be working with underserved youth NEET, we want to ensure that we implement a smart and attractive B2C model that contributes to the solution’s sustainability. 

Third, as we are taking on the challenge of perception-, norms- and behavior-change, it is essential that our solution is supported by a solid monitoring and evaluation plan that not only measures change, but also measures the overall impact of the program linked by the 5 layers of activities. 

Lastly, a partnership with MIT Solve and Octava Foundation can kickstart a virtuous cycle for TVET in the Philippines, where the targeted edtech product improvement, awareness campaign, and the prestige tied with working with MIT Solve and Octava Foundation can help convince more local partners to back up tech-voc prioritization in the Philippines.

1. Business model: Our solution will benefit from expert-driven business modeling that will match our product fit to the market and clients. As we are working with an untapped market of TVET and underserved youth, we hope that mentors from MIT Solve, Octava Foundation, and resource partners will help us refine and test the right business models.
2. Network Connections: Working with the government and industry employers has been Edukasyon's challenge. We need to get buy-in from industry leaders to onboard our solution as we solidly establish our reputation as TVET champions. Connections from the Innovation Challenge, specifically from Octava Foundation’s network in Southeast Asia, will help us forge partnerships for our early adopter clients.
3. Monitoring & Evaluation: Working with social impact experts in MIT's D-LAB will allow us access to global innovation practice in measurable and sustainable interventions for our solution's long-term aim to change behavior in communities.
4. Product/Service Distribution: Academic research and best practices from MIT Solve and partners will inform our products with the latest learning design applications and data-backed methodologies. MIT Solve’s experience working with low-bandwidth education-focused organizations like The Rumie Initiative and 40K Plus could help us adopt similar solutions to underserved markets in Southeast Asia.