‘Education should equip students with practical skills’
The Chief Executive Officer of Legacy and Legacy, Mrs Comfort Ocran, has advised tertiary institutions to expand their curricula and train students to develop their full potential by way of equipping them with practical skills for the job market.
Advertisement
She said currently, there was a disconnect between the curricula of the tertiary institutions and the demands of the job markets, resulting in the large number of unemployed graduates in the country. She also said there was the need for those in academia and operators of industrial establishments to come together to plan curricula that would equip students with the skills needed by industry.
Mrs Ocran was speaking at the second week of the third Entrepreneurship Clinic organised by the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in collaboration with the Centre for Business Development (CBD) in Kumasi.
Aims of the clinic
The month-long programme, sponsored by the HFC Bank for all final-year students of the university, seeks to educate students on all aspects of entrepreneurship and small business management.
It also seeks to throw more light on ethics as the main idea to create awareness and knowledge of opportunities, challenges, characteristics, attitude and skills needed for a successful entrepreneurship and venture creation.
After the programme, participants are expected to learn how to manage and sustain businesses in Ghana, understand the business environment and the opportunities and threats it presents.
It would also help them discover and utilise their potential and understand the country’s business financing systems, including microfinancing.
To achieve its target, carefully selected accomplished business practitioners and entrepreneurs are invited to share their experiences through teaching, mentoring and coaching.
“The current system of learning by rote being implemented in our educational institutions is very bad, since it does not help students to acquire practical lesson or on-the-job training experience which can help them practise in industry effectively,” she said.
Problem-solving approach
Mrs Ocran said the problem-solving approach should be part of the education curricula since it was very crucial in the current education dispensation and advised unemployed graduates to spend quality time thinking seriously about creating new products, exploring job opportunities and working towards making those opportunities beneficial to all.
The Executive Director of Springboard Roadshow Foundation, Mr Albert Ocran, urged students not to concentrate on their academic work only but engage themselves in acquiring other skills during their training in school by taking advantage of workshops, seminars and forums, among other programmes, to enhance their skills to prepare them for the job market.
Needs of the job market
Mr Ocran spent a lot of time taking the students through the various requirements and needs of the job market and some weaknesses exhibited by most graduates during interviews, which make them lose job opportunities.
Prof. Sam Afranie, Provost of CASS, in his welcome address, said the clinic was aimed at sensitising all final year students of the university to what they should look out for before completing their courses of study at the university, adding that now that the public sector was choked, there was the need for graduates to focus their attention on either creating their own jobs or finding jobs in the private sector, which has many job opportunities than the public sector.
