PhilFAQS

Let me start this post off by stating I surely have nothing against nursing.  I have the utmost respect for a man or woman called to that profession and we certainly all need nurses, and as the US population ages we will need more and more.

However, sending a child to nursing school has become one of the huge growth industries in the Philippines and one can’t help but wonder if all the current interest isn’t centered around the fact that work visas for nurses are currently one of the few US visas that Filipinos can qualify for without many problems.

In fact one can be pretty sure this is the case, given that everyday one hears of qualified Filipino MD’s … fully fledged Medical Doctors … taking a semester or two of nursing school to familiarize themselves with nursing specifics and then sitting the Nursing Board exams so that they can go to the US as RN’s.  In my own family my wife and I have been working with a niece who is currently in her senior year of high school.  When asked directly about nursing she readily admits she has little or no interest in nursing, but when college is discussed it is like a broken record, nursing, nursing, nursing … as if that was the only college education of value to anyone.

I’m not qualified as a career counselor, but I did hold jobs for more than 40 years and I have counseled, supervised advised and even disciplined employees for many of those four decades.  I can tell you one important lesson that has come through loud and clear amongst all the myriad hopes, dreams, disasters and dissatisfactions I have seen.

There is nothing worse than a square peg trying to fit in a round hole.  The corners might get worn down over the years, but the fit is never correct.  And if there is one job I can think of off the top of my head where dedication to duty is absolutely essential it would be nursing.  Nurses in the US can be quite well paid, but dealing with the tedium, the risks and the constant need to watch patients die, unable to do anything is not something that a decent salary can make up for. 

If you have relatives ‘hot’ on nursing, or if you are thinking of it yourself, better have a real soul searching heart to heart conversation/reflection on life goals … nursing is not for the faint of heart nor the casual job seeker.

Now of course another criticism that can be leveled at an overseas nursing career is one that fits any OFW occupation … the stress of fragmented families and the waste of family members living all across the globe … financial waste and emotional hardships.

What if there was a way for kids bright enough to go to college, yet not necessarily medically inclined to earn a decent living right here in the Philippines.  I’ve already written about several ideas I have that I feel could bear fruit … one example those who haven’t yet seen it might want to read Outsourcing Is Not Only For The Big Guys or Philippine Telecommuting — Part 5  just for a few ideas.

Something that crossed my desk just a few days ago brought something else up … related to my articles on Computer Aided design work, but with a distinctly different flavor.  Much of my professional career with the planning side of the Air Force and my civilian business experience centered around a technology that is even today only starting to boom … Geographic Information Systems (GIS).  In 25 words or less GIS software is a system which links maps or other images to a database.  One of the most common and profitable place it is seen is in municipal tax assessment work.  It’s quite likely your home town in the US has your tax records and even a drawing of your property online …it’s a very useful technology.

With the type of software currently available it isn’t rocket science either .. but the sheer volume of data that has to be reviewed, corrected, formatted and entered into a GIS to make it useful guarantees technical working at good rates of pay for years and years to come.

Now why couldn’t a kid educated here in the Philippines get a degree or a professional certification (many GIS practitioners have only one or two year certificate programs, they don’t need to be civil engineers or surveyors to do this work). right here in the Philippines.

Well there are schools who teach the subject but it’s not available everywhere and like any ‘brick and mortar’ school a college or university here in the Philippines is going to have a difficult job trying to keep up with the latest advances in the field.

We’ve talked here recently about elementary and high school in the Philippines using distance learning But My Kids Can’t Get an Education in the Philippines, the question come to mind, why not college-level work as well?

Here’s just one example of a "real" school in the US offering full-fledged, industry current course in the field.  You can read their description of the government outlook for workers.  A graduate of a course like this could work many places and could also make a great outsourcing business here in the Philippines taking on the labor of data conversion and verification that has to be done for thousands and thousands of projects yet to be accomplished in the US and other overseas countries.  There is more to outsourcing than answering the phone.

TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR CAREER

uwf.edu/gis/gisonline

The United States Department of Labor has identified Geographic Information Science (GIS) as a key emerging and evolving industry with numerous opportunities as a career path.

"Across the country, tens of thousands of trained [geospatial] workers are needed to fill positions that are going begging." Quoted from GIS.COM

The University of West Florida’s online program delivers a dynamic Geographic Information Science certificate program to students across the country. Students will participate in online courses with instructors who are highly qualified in their field.

Upon completion of the program, students will receive a University of West Florida Certificate in Geographic Information Science, and earn 24 undergraduate semester credit hours of college credit. Students with a bachelor’s degree can earn up to 12 hours of graduate credit and receive a graduate certificate in GIS. The certificate can be used to help fulfill a student’s educational requirement when applying for their GISP certification. Courses taken can transfer into several UWF undergraduate and graduate programs or even programs at other universities.

Popularity: 5% [?]

A faithful reader asked my recommendations on some books about the Philippines. I’m not nearly as well-read as I would like to be.

What? Me read a book? LoL. Seriously, Laurence, a very good request but not one I’m ready to undertake at the moment. I can recommend:

Culture Shock, Philippines

Culture Shock is a classic that explains a lot of the ins and outs of how Filipnos thing and react to common Western “norms”

Some Good Philippine books

I can’t be responsible for all of these, but Amazon has an extensive collection, there’s likely one just for each of you there (Oh, by the way, Amazon does deliver to the Philippines).

Popularity: 5% [?]

If your Philippine experience is anything like mine, you have already been asked for advice on education and likely a time or two been asked to help fund a student in the family.  In 2008, as I write this, college age kids and their parents seem to be focusing on only two things … forego college and take a job in a BPO (Business processing outsourcing) firm … typically a call center … or go to nursing school.  Filipino nurses are in demand in many countries and there is no doubt that nursing can provide a path leading well clear of poverty, while at the same time, providing a useful service to mankind.

My thoughts on this:

A. Avoid the temptation of the BPO business.  These places go all out to lure young people.  Some of their advertising and promo efforts wouldn’t even be allowed in other countries … promises they can’t keep and never intend to … and I feel all their offerings are tenuous at best.

Ten years ago there were virtually no BPO firms in the Philippines.  The industry was all centered on India.  Then, as prices and wages necessarily rose in the Indian sub-continent, entrepreneurs moved operations to the Philippines.  because the Philippines was a better business  environment? Hardly.  Both countries have governments that are about as anti-business as it is possible to be.  Because Filipinos had more English skills?  Hardly.  Indian public schools are far superior to Philippine public schools and students in both countries receive a lot of English education … and both require a lot of retraining/accent coaching to be able to deal with the overseas public.  The businesses moved to the Philippines because Filipinos rushed for jobs at prices that Indian workers wouldn’t touch.  It’s all about "cheap", otherwise all these operations would be in their home countries.

Building a business and a career on "cheap" is very short sighted.  In ten year you come back and read this.  Where will the nexus of BPO be then?  I don’t know, but it won’t be in the Philippines … BPO salaries and costs are rising far faster than the rest of the labor sector, so the writing is certainly on the wall.

So, it’s nursing school then, right?  Well not necessarily.  Nursing is a calling much more than just a job.  I see thousands of nursing school students who have less feel for nursing than a Jeepney driver has for traffic rules.  They are in the schools simply to try and pass the exam, by any means,

(notice how in the widely publicized cheating scandal two years ago, not a single cheating student was thrown out or prosecuted?  (Actually I don’t think anyone was prosecuted, despite the black eye they gave the Philippines) "Oh, you cheated?  Well, we’ll just charge you a retake fee and you’ll go on with life as if cheating was a good thing.  Poor you, having to pay twice".  A sad example of modern morals and medical ethics)

and then get a job in the US for as little time as it takes to make what money they want to and then hurry back to the Philippines to spend it faster than they think.  Now, my apologies to the students who really do hear the call of nursing, you know who you are.  For the rest of you?  You’ll find out just how hard it is, and how fast your money will disappear … your relatives have already mortgaged their own future to give you this chance, and I wish you the best.

So Dave’s all purpose answer to the conundrum?  Well, I have no all purpose answer.  I do feel though that this is a school worthy of note and a through checkout before making career decisions.  Unlike the programs offered by major universities … which essentially are four years of professors with no business acumen reading out of textbooks 9often written by authors with no business experience either) this school requires all students to actual plan, build and operate a business.  Upon graduation they will actually have measurable experience and more importantly, have overcome the overwhelming Filipino attitude of, "If only I could do what those others are doing’".

There’s also a good write-up here, for those of you whose interest I have piqued.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Well I thought this would be a relatively simple thing … a lot of people want to know about the best schools for nursing in the Philippines … and the exams that nursing students have to pass are "big news" here, so finding the top ten or so schools should be easy, no?

Well, in the Philippines, many things aren’t all that easy.  Here’s a list of schools that seem to frequently be in the top ten … the numbers are the percentage of students taking the exam who pass the exam … but much of this data turns out to be 4 or 5 or more years old.  Even newspapers will frequently publish lists 5 years old as if they were current.  Caveat emptor.  So you have to take this all with a grain of salt and some personal updated investigation:

1 UP-Manila 100%
2 St. Paul College-Iloilo 99.57%
3 Silliman University – Dumaguete City 98.39
4 West Visayas State University 97.06%
5 University of Santo Tomas Manila 96.67%
6 Saint Louis University – Baguio City 95.05
7 Mindanao State University Marawi City 95.0%
8 St. Paul College-Dumaguete City 93.38
9 Pamantasan ng Lunsod ng Maynila 92.53%
10 SAINT MARY’S UNIVERSITY – Bayombong 91.02%
11 St. Paul College-Manila 90.81%
12 University of the East-Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Center 90.57%

It’s very hard to find the websites of some of these schools.  This Filipino site does the best that I have seen.

Costs: everyone seems to ask this question … again, seems as if most people ask the last question first.  All these schools are cheap compared with Western nursing schools … the question of their quality seems much more important to me.  I was recently quoted 16,000 PHP per trimester for a full-service nursing school right near my house in Bulacan … prices will vary downward and substantially upward from there.

Curriculum: It’s important to note that virtually all nursing schools are 4 year bachelor of science in nursing courses here in the Philippines.  In the US, many RN’s attend only a 2 years Registered Nurse (RN) course, so make sure you compare apples with apples.  The holder of a BSN in either the US or the Philippines knows more and gets paid more than an RN

Admissions: Many of the top schools are part of pre-school to graduate level college organizations.  Students from the ‘outside’ can not just jump in to a nursing degree program.  Many schools have very tight quotas and stiff entrance exams, so consider the level of the proposed student before deciding what school s/he will go to … they may not make it in.

Language: I find this a problem that is steadily growing worse.  More and more schools teach all but the last year or two in Tagalog or Bisayan …which is silly in two ways.  First, the texts and technical terms are almost always in English (or Latin) and if the student is going to get along well later in a US hospital, language skills are essential.  The number one complaint about Filipino nursing school grads in the US is that patients have trouble understanding them.  I wouldn’t rule out a school because of language, but it’s an important consideration.

Skill Sets: For those of you who have never been in hospital in the Philippines you might be surprised to see the differences in duties between Philippine nurses and their US counterparts.  Here nurses spend much of their shift waiting for professional duties like drawing blood, taking vitals, etc.  The patient is expected to have ‘watchers’ from his/her own family to do the tasks nurses or nurse’s aids do in the US.  Bed pans, sponge bath, changing linens, etc. Make sure your Filipino student is dedicated enough to the field to be able to ‘shift gears’ to meet US standards … it truly is two different worlds.

Let me know what else I can do to help you with school decisions … I never know what information I can find until I try.

Popularity: 5% [?]

28,924 pass board exam for nurses
By Mayen Jaymalin
Friday, February 22, 2008

The Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) said yesterday that 28,924 out of 67,728 examinees passed the nursing licensure examination given by the Board of Nursing last December.

The examinees included retakers in the June 2006 leakage-tainted nursing licensure examination as well as first-timers and repeaters.

A student from the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM) topped the examination, with a rating of 88.40 percent.

rest of article here

Always a popular subject. isn’t it?  At about a 48% pass rate this sessions results are pretty much what can be expected.  Former results can be found here for comparison purposes.

As usual PLM, (University of the City of Manila),  Siliman University and University of the Philippines provided the top ranking candidates … often those schools have 100% pass rates.  While,as usual, there were many dismal showings.  There are schools who have 100% fail rates … nursing education here is a real crap shoot … I highly advise checking the dice before placing chips on the table.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Here’s Part 2 of yeaterday’s article on technoogies you mght wnat to avoid when goingto school in the Philippines. Part 1 is here:

6. C programming As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant but C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking.  A school that teaches only “straight” basic C is not one that is going to prepare you for the real work world. (see also:“Hot Skills, Cold Skills” )

7. PowerBuilder Developed by Powersoft Inc., this client/server development tool in 1994 was bought by Sybase Inc., which was once a strong Oracle competitor.  Today, PowerBuilder developers are at the very bottom of the list of in-demand application development and platform skills.  Nevertheless, the product keeps on trucking, with PowerBuilder 11 expected this year, which has the ability to generate .Net code. (see also: “35 Technologies that shaped the industry” )

8. Certified NetWare Engineers  In the early 1990s, it was all the rage to become a Certified NetWare Engineer, especially with Novell Inc. enjoying 90% market share for PC-based servers. This is one of the market factoids that truly amazes me,  I cut my teeth with NetWare and with the reputation NetWare had and the huge penetration into important government and commercial markets they looked invincible.  Many of NetWare’s nascent competitors were nearly laughable, especially Microsoft’s early efforts.  And Cisco?  They were a shaky little startup that really did nothing better than NetWare and often did less.  Today, however, you don’t have to look far to find CNEs retraining themselves with other skills to stay marketable.

9. PC network administrators With the accelerating move to consolidate Windows servers, there will be substantially less demand for PC network administrators. There will always be networks for the foreseeable future in my view, but much better to equip oneself in a broader, more forward-looking area.  You don’t need to look much farther than Google to see how on-line applications are taking over many traditional desktop tasks … and if a company’s users do their correspondence and spreadsheets on Google, why will they need an administrator?

10. OS/2  This is the one I disliked writing up the most. OS/2 is the “Betamax” of operating systems (yes, Virginia, there was a video tape standard called Beta and it was first on the market and distinctly better than it’s poor choice competitor, VHS, but find it now).  As a joint effort of Microsoft and IBM, OS/2 seemed destined for greatness and the “mechanics” of the operating system are certainly better by far than Microsoft’s or Apples systems.  But IBM and Microsoft, while they could write code, couldn’t play well in the sandbox and OS/2 became and unfortunate collateral victim of the inevitable divorce.  The one place I could recommend OS/2 coursework is in the field of banking.  OS/2 is still supported by Serenity Systems International still sells the operating system under the name eComStation.

Well, there’s a rundown on my list of training you should avoid.  Let me know if you have any suggested additions or deletions.

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I decided to make this post because I’m working on a decent list of the Top Ten Computer Schools in the Philippines, to accompany my recent Top Ten Articles, Top Ten Art Schools in the Philippines and Top Ten Business Schools in the Philippines.

There re a LOT of computer-oriented schools in the Philippines and it’s important to know that you are not buying into a “pig in the poke” when you choose one. 

Many selection factors are easy and similar to schools in other disciplines but a major difference in the computer sphere of influence is, technology and course offerings go stale, quickly.  Here, in no particular order, or ten technologies/skills I have learned, used or contracted big dollars for in the past which are virtually useless today:

1. Cobol  This is one of the most venerable of existing languages and the one on the list most likely to still be useful to learn.  Cobol still powers a significant number of “big business” systems and ads for Cobol programmers and administrators are still to be found.  It’s one of the few “antiques that I have found US-based post-secondary training still available for, at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, (greater St Louis area) is one source that verifies the argument that studying Cobol may not be a totally lost cause.which according to Mary Sumner, a professor there, still offers a Cobol course. “Two of the major employers in the area still use Cobol, and for many of their entry-level jobs, they want to see that on the transcript,” she says. “Until that changes, we’d be doing the students a disservice by not offering it.” (see also: “Cobol Coders: Going, Going, Gone? )

2. Nonrelational DBMS In the 1980s, there were two major database management systems approaches: hierarchical systems, such as IBM’s IMS and SAS Institute Inc.’s System 2000, and network DBMS, such as CA’s IDMS and Oracle Corp.’s DBMS. Today, you had better be learning using the  DBMS approach, such as SQL databases such as DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

3. Non-IP networks TCP/IP has largely taken over the networking world, and as a result, there’s less demand than ever for IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA) skills.  The few Non-IP technologies even less popular than SNA are definitely ones to avoid.  Even if you were to get a job on one of these dinosaur networks you’d, be a virtually “pariah” to your employer, always figuring out ways to eliminate the non-standard systems and perhaps you along with it

4. cc:Mail This store-and-forward LAN-based e-mail system from the 1980s was once used by about 20 million people. Its popularity waned, and in 2000, it was withdrawn from the market. The product is still supported however by According to Foote, “cc:Mail is a bygone era. Now e-mail is tied into everything else, and cc:Mail didn’t make that leap.” Just the same, the product continues to be commercially supported by Global System Services Corp. in Mountain View, California, so it is still not totally dead.

5. ColdFusion This once-popular Web programming language — released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) — has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.’s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages.  There is still an active ColdFusion community but to my view, anone learning technology would be well advised to stick with one of the more mainstream environments. 

Part 2 will publish tomorrow, this is long enough for one post.

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