(Trinidad Guardian) Professor Clement Sankat, pro-vice chancellor and campus principal at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, said the newly opened Centre for Workforce Research and Development (CWRD) will be critically important in a time of stalled economic growth, high youth unemployment and increasing competition within the Caribbean.
“The CWRD will go a long way in helping us to become more prepared and better equipped to compete. It will also help individuals interested in retooling their skill set to better align their knowledge, training and services with our country’s human capital needs,” he said at the opening of the facility on Monday.
The CWRD will focus on harmonizing, standardizing and co-ordinating labour market research. It was conceptualised in 2008 in UWI’s Office of Research Development and Knowledge Transfer, then called the Business Development Office, as a means of creating a regional storehouse of labour market information producing labour market surveys, tracer studies of graduates, skills gap analysis and assessments of demographic and attitudinal profiles of the workforce, particularly as they relate to the movement of skilled people within the Caricom Single Market and Economy.
Tertiary Education Minister Fazal Karim said some of the key objectives of the facility are to “identify the developmental needs of the T&T economies and CSME, identify the size and location of the skills gap for the local and regional economies, ascertain the impact of the free movement of labour on the economies of T&T and CSME and identify the required levels of training for new economic sectors in the Trinidad and Tobago economy.”
He added: “I think one of the things this research would do is reduce the skills mismatch so that people who will have the data when they enter institutions in the tertiary sector, instead of not knowing what the job market holds. I often refer to them as the “graduate glut” or the discouraged graduate.”
