‘Make technical education more attractive to the youth’

The Executive Director of the National Vocational Training Institute (NVTI), Mr Stephen Amponsah, has called on the government to make technical education more attractive to the youth to draw more of them to the field.

 In an interview with the Daily Graphic, he said the unemployment challenges facing the country could be greatly minimised if the country focused on providing skills training, which would equip people to be self-employed and employ other people.

Skills training
“The essence of technical and vocational education and training is to provide skills training to professionals such as artisans, craftsmen and others to contribute to the industrial sector, but inadequate motivation and rewarding systems have not encouraged people to pursue technical and vocational programmes,” he observed.

He also advised students and parents to dispel their minds of the notion that technical education was meant for school dropouts and students with low grades, but rather see education in that field as an opportunity for them to exhibit their skills and provide them with the means of harnessing their potential.

Stakeholders
He stressed the need for the Ministry of Education, the government and civil society organisations, as well as stakeholders in education, to sensitise students at the basic level to the importance of pursuing technical and vocational training and for students to disabuse their minds that the subject was meant for poor-performing students.

He noted that equipping the youth with employable skills through technical education called for quality training and, therefore, appealed to the government to provide technical schools in the country with infrastructure, modern tools, equipment and qualified trainers.

Mr Amponsah described the re-designation of the country’s polytechnics as technical universities as one way of attracting students to pursue technical courses and encouraged the government to remain focused in order to achieve its intended purpose.