Austria: What we do usually is, even for their first year in programming, we group them in order for them to develop team-building skills. Having gone right out of high school, some of them tend to be too shy or there are some who are too rowdy; they are not mature enough so we want them to get used to working together with a team; then they go into their second year. That’s when we begin developing their presentation skills to further improve their communication and interpersonal skills.

CWP: There are some who would say that the very reason they got into IT is because they do not like talking to people; that somehow they made that career choice precisely because of that premise and then all of a sudden they are expected to learn the business side, to be good communicators, etc. How do you handle that?

TAN: There has to be a track for the few technical people and this doesn’t apply only to IT, it applies way back to engineering. La Salle’s graduates, after three years in engineering, they are no longer in real engineering work they are already in sales, marketing, management and other higher levels; that’s why many of these people want to take MBAs rather than take Masters or Doctorate degrees in civil engineering, because they want to become managers, CIOs, CEOs. If you really want to become a CEO or COO you need to have those skills; however this is not only the career path. In the US, you can be a very highly-technical person and you’ll be paid just as much or maybe even more than a COO or CEO because you have a career path on being purely technical. You say “I don’t want to be a COO. I don’t want to work with people; I want to work in my lab. I want to produce things that the company can use.” And these people are paid very well. Unfortunately, in the Philippines, we don’t have that track. It’s the same thing with the electronics industry; it’s very difficult because we don’t really have the R&D (research and development) facility here so you produce somebody who has an MS or a PhD in Electronics and the next thing you know they are already in other countries. We don’t have a track for them. The same is true in the government, you have to become a supervisor; you cannot really just stay in research and be paid very well for it.

Now, I think they are doing that career track for science and technology but again that goes back to the industry. The industry must be willing to say “look, I need this person to be very good programmer, to be very good systems analyst, he can give me all the applications I want. I don’t expect him to be CIO but I’m going to pay him very well, in fact I might pay him just as good as a CIO because he’s going to produce the services and the program that the company will use.” It’s just that you just have to follow that track; we cannot expect everybody to follow the MBA route to become managers.

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