Bridging the unemployment gap
The higher educational landscape has grown from the time when there were just three universities in the 1970s to now when we have more than 50 private and public universities.
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There are other tertiary institutions producing skilled graduates for the job market.
These institutions, such as the polytechnics, the nursing training colleges, the colleges of education and journalism training schools, are producing a large army of trained professionals for an industrial sector that is challenged and cannot recruit many of these trained people.
Some time ago, it was easy for young graduates to find jobs with the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), even during long vacations, not to think of the various industrial plants scattered throughout the country.
It was a taboo to talk about graduate unemployment in those days until the early 2000s when the economy could not provide jobs for the graduates.
There is no empirical evidence, but it appears graduate unemployment reared its ugly head few years after the introduction of the educational reforms which culminated in the training of thousands of young people at all levels of education.
Unfortunately, as the educational sector grows, the industrial sector, and for that matter the job market, has been shrinking, making it difficult for the sector to cope with the expansion in the educational sector.
The linkages that are expected between education and industry have been missing in recent years, as many of our tertiary institutions are running courses that do not offer opportunities for self-employment or jobs in the critical sectors of the economy.
The menace of graduate unemployment is likely to escalate if steps are not taken to draw a link between the relevance of education and the job market.
We can boast the best tertiary institutions turning out brilliant students, but if these students cannot use their hands and brains to create something from their environment, then the unemployment challenge will continue to cause bottlenecks in the economy.
The Daily Graphic is happy that as a nation we have recognised the problem with the opening of a national conference on bridging the gap between education/training and industry yesterday.
President John Dramani Mahama, opening the conference, was said to have lamented the alarming levels of graduate unemployment and wondered how the “large number of MBA Marketing, Humanities and management graduates can be absorbed by the job market”.
The Daily Graphic thinks the conference offers the opportunity for both education and industry to review the training programmes in our tertiary institutions to make them relevant to the needs of the country’s development efforts.
But, more importantly, it will be critical for all university graduates to stop their reliance on the public sector for jobs and team up with their mates to set up companies that can create jobs and wealth.
