By Dean Aubrey Caratiquet
Technical and vocational education training (TVET) continues to remain at the forefront of providing attainable employment opportunities for Filipinos, with the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) doubling down on various initiatives to ensure a brighter future for the citizenry.
At the Palace press briefing on Tuesday, TESDA Secretary Jose Francisco Benitez hailed the P19 billion in scholarship funds received by the agency under the 2026 national budget, which he touts as the biggest allocation of financial resources in the agency’s history.
This is part of the P1.345 trillion in financial resources allocated to the education sector by members of the Senate and House of Representatives in the 2026 General Appropriations Act (GAA), officially inked by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. on Monday.
These funds received by TESDA would cover the training for 9,000 child development workers and the expanded rollout of the Enterprise-Based Education and Training (EBET) Program in the country—with approximately 400 programs expected to serve 100,000 EBET learners in 2026.
Secretary Benitez, moreover, shared that the agency expects to facilitate the learning process of between 600,000 and 650,000 individuals, using the budget received by the agency to help in upskilling the learners and ensure that they remain in sync with digital services through enterprise-based education.
Benitez said, “The good news about the enterprise-based education and training (EBET) is, of course, our employability rates range from around 85% to 95% of those that get trained in those sectors within the industry itself.”
He added further, “What we are trying to do through all of these is to leverage government funds to increase the number of Filipinos that can avail and benefit from the system, particularly through incentives such as EBET incentives in taxes or adopt-a-school processes, but also directly to modalities where employability is the highest.”
The TESDA Chief wrapped up his statement by expounding on the interventions undertaken by TESDA to resolve some of the shortcomings of the K-12 curriculum, which include free assessment of senior high school students to determine their eligibility for technical-vocational courses.
As of press time, almost 190,000 senior high school students have been properly assessed and certified as employable with the appropriate NC-II and NC-III courses.
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