The National Technical Education and Skills Development Plan (NTESDP) 2023- 2028 aims to provide access to high- quality opportunities for lifelong learning, as well as to provide Filipinos with smart and innovative skills. The plan focuses on creating future-ready TVET programs, advancing ladderized education, and pursuing collaborations in recognizing relevant courses offered by NGAs, technical-vocational institutions and HEIs (including state and local universities and colleges). It also aims to increase enterprise-based training (EBT), particularly emphasizing dual training systems, apprenticeships, and learnerships.

Recognizing relevant courses offered by NGAs, technical vocational institutions and HEIs (including state and local universities and colleges). Philippine TVET has to proactively address the urgency for constant skilling, reskilling, and upskilling while cultivating the critical thinking, communications, collaboration, adaptability, futures thinking, and higher-order cognitive skills of the country’s workforce and entrepreneurs. Lifelong learning as a primordial philosophical anchor of Philippine TVET summons a level of quality and availability of training and skills as well as mindset that will make an important difference in employment outcomes of individuals. At the country level, lifelong learning calls for crafting new skills policy and recalibrated TVET directions and programs to help shape workforce readiness and national competitiveness amidst global economic developments and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

At the same time, Philippine TVET has to reinforce its foundations as the country’s primary vehicle of access, inclusivity, and mobility that provides hope and practical economic opportunities for those who are hampered by poverty, geographical and cultural isolation, physical disadvantages, and other challenges. It has to lead in providing the platforms needed to enable the country’s workforce to transition in the green, digital, and knowledge economies and to move across industries and occupations, along career paths that may be nonlinear. It has to champion the flexible pathways between different levels of formal education and for the recognition and development of skills acquired outside formal education.

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