Zeal Environmental Technologies, TTU sign pact for skills transfer
Zeal Environmental Technologies (ZETL), an indigenous company operating in the mining and upstream oil and gas industry, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Takoradi Technical University (TTU) to train industry-ready graduates.
The company, which operates an integrated mining and oilfield waste management facility at Nyankrom in the Shama District in the Western Region, will receive students from TTU under its incubation programme where their skills would be developed.
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At the signing ceremony in Takoradi, the Chief Executive of ZETL, Mr Kwaku Ennin, said the pact would allow students from the technical university to access its incubation centre and the facility for their industrial attachments and lectures.
He said it was obvious that there was a huge gap between the world of work, industry and academia, hence the need to collaborate for both entrepreneurial and technical knowledge to be made available to students and for the tutors to update themselves.
Collaborations
“We are aware of the importance of these collaborations in the training and up-scaling of the knowledge base of students from our universities and, therefore, we’re opening our doors to enable even lecturers to access and acquaint themselves with new happenings at the industrial front,” he said.
Mr Ennin said things changed quickly in the sector, a situation which required constant innovation and huge investment, “therefore we place premium on human resource development through our institutions of higher learning to drive the change.”
He added that the industry required highly skilled human resources, hence such investments in equipment and installations without the corresponding skills to operate them would amount to nothing,” he said.
Mr Ennin indicated that his company was committed to supporting training institutions to develop the needed human resource for the management of the country’s environmental waste and other such services.
Innovation, excellence
For his part, the Vice-Chancellor of TTU, Rev. Prof. Frank Eshun, said such collaborations would help the technical university to achieve its vision of becoming a world-class technical university recognised for excellence, innovation and societal relevance.
The university, he said, was also committed to the provision of higher education in the engineering, science and technology-based disciplines; technical and vocational programmes as well as applied arts and related disciplines.
The Vice-Chancellor said modern society was characterised by constant changes, therefore, the need to ensure that the university positioned itself to adapt quickly in order to remain relevant.
“Today, everything is academia and industry collaboration to ensure that we churn out products that are relevant to present demands and readily employable.
Therefore, we find the collaboration with Zeal Environmental Technologies as very important and strategic,” Rev. Prof. Eshun said.
He said TTU had other collaborations for the training of its students in areas related to the oil and gas industry.