How to optimize production and productivity through the enhancement of human resource capacity is arguably the most compelling preoccupation of the vocational education curriculum in Guyana. In recent weeks sections of the print media have attracted a considerable volume of advertising from institutions offering courses in worker effectiveness enhancement ranging from Human Resource Management to Customer Service, responding to what they perceive to be a disturbing deficiency in both public and private sector workplaces.
Corporate Advocates Advertising Agency, a small institution situated on Duncan street in Bel-Air-Park is among the many agency offering answers to questions relating to building capacity through training and the Agency’s Executive Manager, Gary Thompson, believes that his own approach to preparing people for work ought to be taken more seriously.
Thompson told Stabroek Business during a recent interview that his approach to training employs a mix of the traditional approach of imparting knowledge and motivating and inspiring people to optimize their capacity. His approach begins from the assumption that academic training cannot be separated from approaches that seek to inspire people if they are to secure their fullest potential.
His training in the disciplines of marketing and project management may have imbued in him an understanding of the importance of “having an academic base.” His focus, however, is on people, rather than on their academic accomplishments. Everyone, he says, has a capacity for achievement. “It is a matter of putting them in touch with that capacity.
Pride and passion, Thompson says, are perhaps the most critical worker requisites. “I believe that people perform best in an environment in which they have a real interest. People who like what they do perform better.” He makes this point, cognizant of the fact that many people do less than ideal jobs but argues, nonetheless, that the enabling environment, including, crucially, their relationships with their employers can enhance their zeal and enthusiasm.
Corporate Advocates Advertising Agency offers traditional courses in various business-related disciplines for small mostly private sector enterprises and Thompson says that he is seeking to encourage the broader private sector to infuse his own approach of inspiring and motivating people into their training regimes. His 120-page book Realize Real Success In your Life: Strategic Communication embraces mostly philosophical issues including considerations of personal growth and identifying goals and objectives and reads much more like a primer for personal development than a conventional business text and while the material is less effectively ordered than it could have been the book remains focused on the themes of leadership, motivation, communication and self-actualization, issues which Thompson says are central to enhancing the quality of the local work force.
Thompson’s views on Guyana’s economy and on its wider development are centred around a conviction that “much more is possible,” that the constraints of technological underdevelopment and material poverty are deficiencies that can be overcome through the application of effort to seeking to make something of what you have. It is a thought process which, perhaps, somewhat overlooks some of the more complex dynamics of barriers to development; still, its arguments about the capacity to achieve through a combination of diligent effort and sustained self-belief are altogether valid.
When Stabroek Business met with Thompson he was in the process of packaging some of his ideas for training on CD, optimistic that his views can find currency on a local market where there is already no shortage of training curricula for workplace efficiency. He wants, he says, to seek to create a more balanced focus between offering training in the conventional disciplines and teaching people to maximize their own innate capacity to achieve.
