Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Anil Nandlall has charged graduates at the Port Mourant Training Centre to capitalise on the education opportunities available there as their skills are in demand both here and abroad.
“You have a government that is prepared to invest in your future, but it is largely your future and you are the architects of your own destiny,” he said in his feature address at the centre’s second graduation exercise for its evening classes students.
According to a Govern-ment Information Agency (GINA) report, the graduates are from the Board of Industrial Training (BIT)/ Guyana Sugar Corpora-tion’s (GuySuCo) evening classes at the training centre. The students graduated from six different courses: Basic Fitting and Machin-ing, Electrical Installation 1, Motor Vehicle Servicing and Repairs, Refrigeration, Welding and Fabrication and Supervisory Manage-ment respectively.
Nandlall reiterated that government is making opportunities for education available to the nation, particularly youth. “Every year if you look at our annual Budget you would see that the singular, largest budgetary allocation goes towards education. When you look at our budget totally, you will see that almost a third of that budget is directed to the social sector of our country,” he said.
Nandlall said the administration is interested in developing its “human capital” as “no society has ever advanced; no country has ever been built without investments made in the people of that country or that society, in terms of training them, educating them, in terms of equipping them to take charge of the developmental trajectory of that country or society.”
He then referred to countries like Japan, Malaysia and Singapore that are limited in their natural resources and have, according to him, “made the decision that they must invest in their human capital and they already have and today these are some of the leading economies in the world. That is the philosophy and ideology that guides this government when it invests in young people.”
“Therefore as you graduate please recognise that it is only the beginning of what is a path, a journey that will only take you upwards and in aiming upwards let only the sky be your limit. I don’t want to see you confine your future to the skills that you have acquired today, let these skills be the foundation upon which you would build your future,” he said. Nandlall again reiterated that the graduates’ skills are in demand noting that when the Chinese were constructing the Marriott Hotel they requested Chinese labour similar to the Indians during construction of the stadium as the skill sets required were not readily available here.
The AG further observed that the “world will not operate at your speed you have to operate at the world’s speed, and therefore, as you embark on your professional pursuits in relation to what you plan for yourself just be cognisant of the fact that you are entering a very exciting and challenging world where if you are not equipped then you will be eliminated in the competition.”
Meanwhile in his address, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Industrial Training, Human Resources Director of GuySuCo, Jairam Petam said that graduates from the institution would be welcomed with open arms anywhere because of the high standards that the centre has been able to maintain.
He outlined that the focus of the BIT has shifted from being one of regulation to one of the delivery of technical training for Guyana and the industries that need the skills which are produced in the institution. Petam also said that the training is no longer restricted to engineering, but is available in many aspects to make persons employable across the country. He then congratulated them on their achievements in their respective fields whilst underscoring the genesis of the evening classes which began in 2013 under the guidance of the late Dr. Dale Bisnauth.
“What we are doing at the Board of Industrial Training [BIT] is to make the unemployed, employable. Those who do not have the skills, we create those skills in those individuals and we make them employable that is the basic philosophy of what drives the BIT in this direction,” he said.
