By Jacquelyn Hamer
Jacquelyn Hamer is a retired Guyanese diplomat and a Director of the skills training organization Visions of Excellence.
The recent public advertisement by Demerara Distillers Ltd. regarding its Graduate Training Programme tells us a number of things about the state of the labour market in Guyana and the implications of that condition for the future of the productive sector. DDL is by no means the only private sector entity that is seeking to invest in its human capital. It is a good sign, a sign that the company is thinking into the future and is in it for the long haul. It bespeaks a measure of confidence in Guyana’s economy and in the future of our country.
I recall reading in the Stabroek Business some time ago a story in which the Chief Executive Officer of Neal and Massy Mr. Deo Persaud expressed concern over the scarcity of skilled personnel to serve the productive sector, a situation which he attributed to the continual flight of skills from the country. He made the point then that the problems associated with the attrition rate had caused Neal and Massy to pay even greater attention to its own in-service training. It seemed to me at the time that too few entities in the productive sector were taking Mr. Persaud’s point-of-view seriously. The assumption appeared to be that there would always be a pool – however small – of trained people from which they could meet their own limited needs. That assumption no longer applies. The attrition rate these days coupled with the inability of local training institutions to turn out the requisite numbers of trained people to meet the needs of the productive sector has created a near state of emergency. One expects that we will probably be even further challenged by the new training demands have already arisen out of the infusion of relentless information technology innovations into the production process. The point made by GT&T’s Chief Financial Officer Yog Mahadeo recently about the range of new business opportunities that will emerge from the installation of the company’s submarine cable also raises the question of the training demands that must be met if we are to take advantage of those opportunities.
Interestingly, the recent DDL advertisement speaks specifically about “trainee engineers, chemists” and “marketing trainees.” Again, the sets of skills which DDL says it requires tells us a great deal about where the company is placing its priorities. Skills in engineering are critical to the operation and maintenance of plant, chemistry is a critical requirement in the manufacture of spirits and as far as its rum is concerned DDL runs one of the largest international marketing programmes among local manufacturing entities. Hence the need for those particular sets of skills. It is really much the same with the rest of the productive sector. All forms of production require some measure of technical skills and those that are extant in the Guyana economy also require, for the most part, the application of some measure of science and technology. Additionally, there is the need to properly manage these various production processes and – if we are to maximize our export earnings – marketing skills to sell what we produce.
How to recruit, train and retain a multi-skilled cadre of professionals to manage the productive sector is a challenge which Guyana has been unable to overcome. In the public sector, particularly, efforts to retain skilled personnel have been a near disaster. Graduates who have been trained abroad at considerable public expense have simply not returned to Guyana, their excuses being – among other things – political instability, diminished social standards and poor pay. Pretty much the same reasons are being advanced today, the notable exception being our Cuban-trained doctors. Fewer scholarships are available through the private sector though some private sector entities are known to run various in-service courses that help their people to learn on the job. We know from the examples of other countries, however, that except private sector companies can set up entities that a specifically designed for training and nothing more In-Service training can be cumbersome and can sometimes distract from the substantive pursuits of the company. All of this, of course, points to an overall failure to fashion a national training regime that responds to the key needs of the productive sector.
By now it must be a year since the University of Guyana and the private sector met at a hotel in Georgetown to talk about a role for UG in helping to meet the training needs of the business community and, more particularly, the private sector. I recall an excellent presentation by the University of Guyana Vice Chancellor Professor Lawrence Carrington at that forum during which he made the point about the nexus between universities across the world and training and technological advances in those countries and of the need for companies to invest in the capacity of UG to help do the same thing here. It seems to me that Professor Carrington was making the point the universities cannot exist in splendid isolation from the rest of the society. University curricula must be designed to respond to the various training needs of the society including those that are linked to the expansion and growth of those sectors that are responsible for wealth-creation. I expect that he would agree too that poor countries – like Guyana – particularly, cannot afford to run a university that is detached from those needs. That, in my view, has been largely the case with the University of Guyana.
What now appears to be a greater sensitivity to reassessing the role of the university coincides with a preoccupation on the part of the Vice Chancellor with the various other myriad problems of the institution. That having been said it would be comforting to know that, between them, UG and the private sector have set up some sort of working group to advance the process which they discussed so many months ago. There is scope, in my view for a collaborative effort involving local entities like DDL, Banks DIH Ltd, GT&T, Neal & Massy, and others to work with the university to fashion programmes from which the rest of the productive sector can benefit.
Here, part of the challenge lies, first, in recognizing the role of the University of Guyana within the context outlined by Professor Carrington; and once we recognise the university’s role it becomes quite evident that what is needed is some measure of curriculum restructuring at Turkeyen to take account of the human resource needs in the local productive sector. We have, time and again, gone over the issue of whether or not UG has not been simply an institution for churning out graduates who are ill-equipped to serve the core needs of the society, particularly in the areas of science and technology which are the areas to which the private sector looks, primarily, to enhance their production and productivity and to improve the quality of their products.
There is another important issue deserving of mention at this juncture. Assuming that the provisions of the Financial Enactments (Amendment) Bill come into effect as quickly as we hope it will – incidentally, I believe passage of the Bill could be an important development for the small business sector – there is likely to be any number of potential entrepreneurs seeking to secure funding for one venture or another. What this will mean is that skills such as project proposal preparation, business planning, business management, financial management, marketing et al are likely to be in much greater demand. (I propose to examine the Bill and some of its likely implications in a subsequent column) What this means, of course, is the new entrants into the world of entrepreneurship will have to be taught these skills since the last thing we need is a well-intentioned piece of legislation that results in a litany of failed projects.
On a wider scale, what is needed if the training resources of the University of Guyana and the various tertiary institutions are to be maximized are audits that seek to determine the range and types of skills required in the productive sector. In this regard the Private Sector Commission, the Guyana Manufacturers and Services Association and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry can collectively pursue this kind of research which can then be applied to curriculum planning at the level of the training institutions.
In the short to medium term at least the productive sector will have to look beyond the University of Guyana to meet its human capital and research needs. We can, however, look beyond UG, to the various tertiary institutions – some of which will have to be re-organized and restructured – and in the case of agriculture and agri-manufacturing, to institutions like NARI and the Guyana School of Agriculture, which institutions are already making contributions of their own. The point is that if our training institutions are to provide the human capital that we need it will be necessary to fashion a plan that ties their curricula to the human resource needs of the productive sector.
We learnt recently that the Arthur Loc Jack School of Business of the University of the West Indies has commenced an MBA programme here in Guyana and that some business entities here are financing training for their employees. Additionally, I believe that this is as good an opportunity as any for local private sector organizations like the PSC ad the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry to go one step further by seeking to partner with regional institutions like the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce (CAIC) to provide various forms of institutionalized training for private sector employees. Here, the opportunity also arises to press experienced local and regional entrepreneurs into service as instructors and lecturers in order to compensate for the scarcity of teaching resources at UG and the various tertiary institutions.
How to capture more of our young people – who, for one reason or another, decline the option of a conventional academic education – within our technical institutions is a challenge which our education system is yet to overcome. I have always thought that perhaps we could have more apprenticeship schemes through which the private sector could meet the tuition costs for young men and women to attend tertiary institutions and provide the deserving ones with employment at the end of the day. The immediate benefits of such a scheme would be, first, that the attendance levels at our tertiary institutions would increase and, secondly, that more young people entering the world of work, in the manufacturing and industrial sectors, particularly, would enter with some minimum level of qualification secured at one or another tertiary institution. The third benefit, of course, is that a better trained high school and/or tertiary education graduate would increase the likelihood of pushing unemployment levels down.
The IT revolution has brought with it what I would describe as a fashion for computers. There are, however, far too many instances in which the paraphanalia of information technology is no more than an outward manifestation of technological advancement and nothing more. I applaud, for example, initiatives designed to place more computers in schools, enabling access by children even at the primary level. I doubt, however, that there are sufficient teachers around who can properly train the children in the use of computers since the teachers themselves benefit from no such training at the Cyril Potter College of Education. Here again, if there is to be any kind of nexus between what our educational institutions offer and the human capital needs of our country, the institutions that train our teachers must incorporate some measure of IT proficiency training into their curricula.