Participants call for collaboration between education/training, industry
Discussants at the national conference on bridging the gap between education/training and industry have called for collaboration among the government, higher education institutions and industry to produce an employable workforce in the country.
Advertisement
They contended that though tertiary institutions had the mandate to turn out an educated workforce, it behoved industry to equip such workforce with the requisite employable skills with minimal training to enable them to fit into their respective positions.
The conference, organised by the Ministry of Education, brought together technocrats, the academia, captains of industry, politicians, vice chancellors of universities and students to brainstorm on ways of bridging the gap between what is taught in school and the expectations on the field.
Support for higher education
Contributing to the discussion, the Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Professor Franklyn Acheampong Manu, spoke about the level of investment made by the industry to support higher education in the country.
“Industry puts more money into beauty pageants, festivals and the like because those are the areas they get the needed publicity,” he said.
He suggested that if industry was so particular about employable skills, then it should focus more on vocational training, explaining that the university ought to prepare people for life-long learning.
Prof. Manu expressed the belief that industry needed its own policy to specify what they meant by employable skills, adding that producing employable graduates was not the responsibility of the university. He therefore said it was incumbent on industry to invest in the training of university graduates to gain the employable skills.
The Trade and Industry Minister, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, expressed the hope that the outcome of the conference would be an opportunity for the government, the educational sector and industry to work together.
Yawning gap
The Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, Nii Armah Ashiettey, noted that the current unemployment situation that had bedevilled the country was a reflection of the kind of skills training and educational strategies the country had adopted in the past.
According to him, there is “a yawning gap between the needs and requirements of the industry and the education process,” from the basic to the post-tertiary level.
Nii Ashiettey announced that his ministry was in the process of establishing the Ghana Market Information System to serve as a platform for inputs for the development of new or revised courses and training programmes, selection of equipment and learning materials, instructor formation and guidance and counselling of students and trainees.
Collaboration
He said the ministry considered vocational training as the catalyst for socio-economic and technological advancement and had, therefore, taken steps to make it attractive to all and sundry.
“In this regard, my ministry had been collaborating with the accredited demand-driven skills training and development institutions such as the National Vocational Training Institute (NVTI), Management Development and Productivity Institute (MDPI), Opportunities Industrialisation Centre Ghana (OIC-G) and Integrated Community Centres for Employable Skills (ICCES) to train the youth and unemployed persons to acquire the requisite skills for gainful employment,” he hinted.
Nii Ashiettey suggested that the GETFund Act needed to be amended to include Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) to enable TVET institutions to also benefit from it.
“Currently, the GETFund focuses mainly on providing financial support to the traditional secondary and tertiary schools to the exclusion of the technical and vocational training institutions and programmes.
“Furthermore, the policy of free SHS and other subsidies such as capitation grant should be extended to cover the TVET institutions to ensure equity and make them attractive,” he explained.