By Prince Golez
The Marcos Jr. administration is building the country’s pool of cybercrime professionals to tap the world’s huge market for cybersecurity experts, Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Ivan John Uy said.
In a Palace briefing Tuesday, Uy said there are 2 million cybersecurity job openings worldwide that the Philippines can fill.
“If we can supply, even just one-fourth of that, 500,000, I think that’s a very, very ambitious number. But, I think we need to build up the interest and we need to develop the necessary talent,” the secretary said.
“So, iyan ho ang pinagkakaabalahan natin, is building up. Kasi hindi lang po ito abroad, itong mga BPOs (business process outsourcing) natin, dito sa Pilipinas and mga financial institutions natin, mga bangko, mga business sector, they are all are looking for that,” he pointed out.
According to Uy, one of the challenges is educating and certifying Filipino cybersecurity experts.
Under the administration, the DICT is focused on inviting technical people to enroll in either subsidized or free education and then assisting them in becoming certified. They become employable after receiving certification from Cisco, Oracle, Intel, and Microsoft.
“So, iyan ang mga short programs, but we will be able to bridge that gap, because napakagaling po natin, ngunit ang kulang lang is building up on those credentials,” the DICT chief said.
In comparison to other countries, the Philippines has a very small number of Certified Information Systems Security Professionals, or CISSP-certified experts, with only about 200 professionals compared with Singapore’s 3,000 cybersecurity experts, he noted.
“Napakaliit na bansa ang Singapore, bakit ganoon ang numbers nila? Dito sa atin, 200 something lang and only 30 percent of them are in-country. The 70 percent are actually working abroad,” said Uy.
“So, we need to build up that competency. Kaya iyon ang programs na nilo-launch namin sa DICT to aggressively provide the technical know-how,” he added.
