Part of the strategies of the Human Resource Development Convergence Program in the Sugarcane Industry of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) is the conduct of public discussion among government agencies and partners about skills development for sugarcane workers. With the aim of contributing to this discussion, the paper aims to generate a skills profile of the target workforce and consequently draw some implications of this skills profile to the Convergence Program. Using available and relevant encoded data from the DOLE-funded Nationwide Profiling of sugarcane workers to determine the skills profile, the findings indicate that majority of the research’s subject workforce is low-skilled and unskilled. To strengthen efforts to provide skills development for these vulnerable workers, the paper calls for the full implementation of planned interventions under the Program along with the creation of an enabling environment that supports these interventions. Given grave limitations of data, results from the project are far from conclusive and may only be relevant to Region II, the region that is presently with complete data.
