PH talent global ranking improves 6 notches

The Philippines ranked 49th out of 63 countries in the 2019 World Talent Ranking (WTR), six notches higher from 2018 when the country placed 55th largely on readiness of its manpower despite poor investments and development on education.

The WTR, a publication of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) with the Asian Institute of Management RSN Policy Center for Competitiveness as its Philippine partner, ranks countries based on their ability to attract, develop, and retain a talented pool of human resources that businesses can employ. The 2019 edition ranked countries using 32 criteria grouped into three factors – Investment and Development, Appeal, and Readiness.

Among the three factors, Readiness has consistently been the highest-ranked, placing 26th this year – an 11-place improvement from last year’s 37th. The relatively higher rank of the Readiness factor was mostly driven by indicators on skilled labor, language skills, and share of science graduates among college degree holders. The next higher ranked factor was Appeal at 31st, an improvement from last year’s 38th. The highest ranked indicators under Appeal were cost of living and effective personal income tax rate; while the lower ranked were quality of life, justice, and brain drain.

On Readiness, the Philippines scored its highest placing 3rd on skilled labor, which indicates the country’s availability of skilled manpower with a value of 7.05. The country also finished higher on the indicator graduates in sciences at 13th with 28.74 percent of graduates are in ICT, engineering, math and natural sciences.

The Philippines also ranked higher at 16th place under language skills indicating that Filipino talents are meeting the needs of enterprises in terms of English language proficiency.

Among the 12 indicators under the Readiness factor, the Philippines ranked its lowest in student mobility inbound at 56th. This indicator measures the number of students with foreign tertiary-level of education per 1,000 inhabitants.

The Philippines also posted declines in other indicators such as primary and secondary education to meet the needs of a competitive economy as it ranked 43rd. It has also lower scores on other education related indicators including competent senior manager, international experience, finance skills, university education, management education, university education, educational assessment and labor force growth.

Under the Appeal factor, which measures the ability of a country to attract and retain high-quality human resources from abroad, the Philippines has only two positive scores on cost-of-living index and effective personal income tax rate.

It ranked 15th under the costof-living, an index of a basket of goods and services in the main city, including housing. It also ranked 8th under effective personal income tax rate as a percentage of an income equal to GDP per capita. But rank poorly in other indicators such as quality of life (49th), justice (48th), brain drain (47th), remuneration in services professions (43rd), exposure to particle pollution (42nd), remuneration of management (35th), foreign highly-skilled personnel (32nd), attracting and retaining talents (30th), and worker motivation (29th).