National Service to provide entrepreneurial skills for youth - Osei Assibey
The National Service Scheme (NSS) is shifting paradigm from purely deploying personnel for a year to becoming an agency that permanently offers employment opportunities, as well as provide entrepreneurial and employment skills for the youth, the Executive Director, Mr Osei Assibey Antwi, has announced.
He explained that the new move was aimed at repositioning the scheme to retain some of its personnel after their national service, ensure that those who went out to the world of work were capable and ready to create their own companies, employ others and or fit and ready to be employed.
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Mr Osei-Assibey said this at the beginning of a two-day training for senior management members and regional directors of the NSS and others in Accra last Saturday.
The resource persons were from the world-renowned management coaching and corporate growth experts, the I am Worth It Project.
The training was on the theme: “Deployment for employment: The NSS approach to development”.
Direction
Mr Osei Assibey said the new direction had become urgent, looking at the increasing number of youth who were deployed by the scheme and the impending situation which would exponentially increase the number of service persons.
He indicated that the new additions would come from teacher training colleges, nurses training colleges now awarding degrees, the expansion of increased avenues for students pursuing Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET) courses at the tertiary level, as well as allied sciences tertiary institutions.
“This is the reason we need to sharpen our skills, be innovative and relevant to the entrepreneurial and employment needs of the personnel we deploy,” he added.
He said the managers of the scheme had so far done exceptionally well in establishing new work modules to ensure that service personnel had hands-on experience, skill sets and knowledge before they completed their service.
Minister
In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, commended the executive director and his management team for repositioning the NSS in a short term to have a workforce that was competent, well resourced, dedicated and committed to the cause of the vision to achieve greater heights.
He called on the staff and management to contribute in diverse ways to ensure the realisation of the repositioning drive spearheaded by the executive director.
He noted that over the years, the scheme had primarily focused on deploying graduates of various programmes from accredited tertiary institutions, but at the onset of the Akufo-Addo administration, a new outlook in terms of introducing sound modules aimed at equipping personnel with the relevant skills and creating jobs (through institutional collaboration) had been put in force.
New programmes
These new programmes include NSS/Ghana Tech Lab, NSS/Agri Impact, NSS/University of Professional Studies, Accra and NSS/Ghana Tourism Authority, with a primary concentration in greenhouse management, entrepreneurial skills, information technology and assisting the tourism industry with adequate human resource.
Dr Adutwum said the government continued to support state agencies to assist in the organisation of programmes of that nature to harness the human resource capacity of their workforce.
He added that those were being done because the government believed that one of the surest ways to increase productivity was through a well-resourced workforce which was abreast of modern-day international best practices.
The Board Chairman of the NSS, Nee Tetteh Fio, indicated that the scheme would be 50 years next year and so it was crucial, at this stage, to put in measures that would sustain the positive impact it had had on the personnel deployed over the years to tell its successful and positive story.
The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the I am Worth It Project, Ms Tammy Sherger, called on the participants to change their mindset from thinking that change was impossible and take proper and thought-out-action to be very successful.