MANILA -- The administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., through the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), is building the country’s pool of cybercrime professionals to tap the world’s huge market for cybersecurity experts, DICT Secretary Ivan Uy said on Tuesday.

In a press briefing in Malacañang, Uy said there are 2 million job vacancies in the world for cybersecurity professionals, which the Philippines can tap.

“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,” Uy 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,” the DICT chief said.

One of the problems is educating and certifying Filipino cybersecurity experts, according to Uy.

Under the Marcos administration, the DICT is focused on inviting technical people to enroll in either subsidized or free education and then help them to get certified.

Once they get the certificate from Cisco, Oracle, Intel and Microsoft, they become employable. 

“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,” Uy said.

Uy said the Philippines has a very small number of Certified Information Systems Security Professionals or CISSP-certified experts compared with other countries.

It only has about 200 professionals compared with Singapore’s 3,000 cybersecurity experts.  

“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,” the DICT Secretary said.

“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. (OPS-PND)