The Development of the 21st Century Skills through the Work Immersion Program: An Input to Mobilized Partnership Program

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The role of the K to 12 Program is to hone employment ready nation builders by developing their 21st century skills. With the goal of ensuring global competitiveness among senior high school students, a work immersion program has been implemented for them to apply in real work setting what they have learned in the classrooms. However, the initial implementation was confronted by several problems related to the preparation, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation phases that somehow hindered the students' acquisition of skills to a great extent. With this, the researcher conducted astudy to determine if the 21st century skills have been developed among the Grade 12 senior high school students through the work immersion program.

METHODS

A quantitative descriptive method of research was used by the researcher to reveal the development in the 21st century skills among Grade 12 students through the work immersion program. A researcher-made questionnaire was used as a tool to gather the needed information from the respondents. This study was participated by the 155 Grade 12 students who underwent the work immersion program during the first semester of the school year, 2018-2019. They were identified through the purposive sampling technique.

RESULTS

Majority of the respondents were 18 years old, most of them are female and belong to TVL-HE strand. Then, the respondents strongly agreed that among the four learning and innovation skills, collaboration skills were greatly developed during the work immersion program. Likewise, they just agreed that ICT literacy was developed among the information, media and technology skills. Moreover, flexibility and adaptability was also cultivated in them as these are part of the life and career skills. In lieu, the respondents encountered some problems that hindered the development of these 21st century skills. It was noted that work descriptions were vague that resulted to confusing tasks. In addition, lack of equipment and facilities delayed the accomplishment of task, and there was lack of encouraging words.

DISCUSSIONS

The results demonstrate a need for a mobilized industry partnership program to address the constraints met by the respondents. This is with the positive goal of meeting both ends: ensuring a positive image of the industry partners and letting them visualize their establishment in a different perspective, and ensuring the development of the 21st of the century skills among the next batch of work immersionists.