It would not have escaped the attention of careful observers that President Donald Ramotar’s promise of a highly educated work force, made to investors at last Thursday’s ceremony to mark the opening of Qualfon’s East Bank operations, came a matter of weeks before his government seeks to be returned to office at the May 11 general elections. One makes this observation not out of a desire to challenge the sincerity of Mr Ramotar’s undertaking, but to make the point that since politicians are known to be free and easy with their promises during the election season, wisdom counsels that at this time they be scrutinized more closely. The same, of course, goes for the various other promises and undertakings that Mr Ramotar and his political allies and adversaries are likely to make in the weeks ahead.
It transpires not only that Guyana is seriously deficient as far as a highly-educated work force is concerned, but that a considerable infusion of skills in a number of areas is just what we need if the country’s developmental aspirations are to be realized. The point has been made to the Stabroek News, particularly by private sector leaders, time and again, that job opportunities in the managerial and some technical sectors are frequently responded to by applicants who simply do not possess the skills that those jobs require. In the case of the managerial positions, one CEO told us, that was not surprising since a great many of the country’s qualified managers live and work abroad. It is much the same in some areas of the public sector, where our current crop of permanent secretaries are nowhere near as experienced as their predecessors of a decade or two ago.
As far as the private sector is concerned a point has been reached where aggressive head-hunting for skilled and qualified persons, even to the extent of poaching skills from other entities has become commonplace. What that amounts to in essence is digging one hole to fill another, which, of course, is not a solution to the problem of scarce skills.
One of the assertions made by Mr Ramotar during his Qualfon address had to do with what he said was Guyana’s achievement of universal primary education, and the fact that it was on the verge of achieving universal secondary education. If it is all well and good to make these eye-catching assertions, we ought to ensure that in the process we do not ignore the growing numbers of children who fail to complete the primary or secondary levels and who, in many cases, can, at best, say that they attended a secondary school but can make no claim to any meaningful academic accomplishment. No less worrying are what in a significant number of instances are the dismal results that we return year after year in mathematics and the natural sciences, subject areas which, more than most others, are critical to turning out the highly educated and presumably technically savvy work force of which Mr Ramotar speaks.
The acquisition of a skilled work force requires not only that significant investments are made in creating the human and physical infrastructure necessary for the delivery of curricula that seek to create a particular kind of work force, it also requires a structured regimen of curriculum guidance that points students in those areas where skills are needed.
Here is Guyana, relationships between state and private sector institutions requiring specialist skills and our technical institutions and the University of Guyana are, at best, tenuous. True, there have been some initiatives on the part of UG and the private sector to develop relationships intended to cater for training in areas where job skills are needed. While at least one CEO in the IT sector has made public his satisfaction with the quality of persons he has recruited from UG, the university-private sector relationship has not been known to bear a great deal of meaningful fruit as far as significantly enhancing our skilled work force is concerned.
Mr Ramotar’s undertaking must also be evaluated against the backdrop of the current state of the University of Guyana which is not only afflicted by a condition of acute neglect by the state and therefore in no position to contribute to the promised ‘highly skilled work force,’ but has also, for many years, been as much a political football as an institution of learning, a circumstance that has hopelessly undermined the fulfilment of its substantive purpose. In the foreseeable future the expansion of the IT and hospitality sectors, the graduation of the gold sector to underground mining and, we hope, the emergence of an oil industry will require new skills sets that will necessitate investment in education both at home and abroad.
There is a sense in which we have already fallen considerably behind. The pressures of an expanding economy have long been making a credible case for investment in a better trained work force. Unfortunately, such official response as has been forthcoming has been meagre, unstructured and not designed to target the existing skills deficiencies. Equally, there appears to have been no forward-looking programme designed to address skills creation from the standpoint of expanding and emerging sectors. The point about all this is that if Mr Ramotar’s promise to investors is to be kept, we must be under no illusions about the fact that whichever government is tasked with implementing that undertaking, it will, from the very inception, be playing some serious catch-up.
