Assessing the alignment of Philippine higher education with the emerging demands for data science and analytics workforce

Rapid advancement in technology has allowed for far-reaching use of data. This has consequently led to an increasing demand for Data Science and Analytics (DSA) professionals. However, recent studies show that such demand is often not met in many economies. Such DSA skills shortage is claimed to be rooted in the mismatch between the skills the industry demands and the skills academic institutions supply. This mismatch is evident in the Philippines where studies also reveal certain difficulties of current Philippine education and training to meet the level of competencies required to do high-skilled jobs. An indicator of this weak point is the persistent high youth unemployment and underemployment rate in the Philippines where graduates land jobs which their completed education did not intend for them. As the first step in addressing this shortage of industry-ready DSA workers, it is necessary to know the DSA skills demanded by the industry and the DSA skills with which academic institutions equip their students. To do this, the study employed the Analytics Association of the Philippines' (AAP) Professional Maturity Model, which is based on the ten APEC-recommended DSA competencies, as analytical framework. It estimated the current availability of DSA competencies using available data from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) and interviews with companies engaged in analytics activities. Meanwhile, the profiling into four DSA job roles (Data Steward, Data Engineer, Data Scientist and Functional Analyst) of these workers was done with the use of relevant data from online job postings. On the other hand, the current supply for DSA job roles were mainly determined from survey interviews of analytics practitioners and undergraduate program administrators and CHED's databases. [...]