With what the institution’s Chief Executive Officer James Bovell says is an “eye to the country’s evolving skills needs,” the Brickdam-based The Business School (TBS) has unveiled a suite of courses that seeks, it says, to respond to current and emerging workplace requirements in both the public and private sectors.
“It is a matter of looking ahead and if you take a look at what lies ahead for our country as far as workplace skills are concerned you will find that the need exists in both the public and private sectors for particular skills sets. The template for what we are offering is based on what we see as a requirement to try to meet, simultaneously, the needs of both the public and private sectors. We cannot wait until the needs are actually on top of us to begin to train people to meet those needs,” Bovell told Stabroek Business in an interview late last week.
TBS’ current ‘training curriculum’, released by its Corporate Training Department recently and which includes up to 98 short seminars, targets “organizations seeking to train their employees …across multiple disciplines.” Several of the intense and highly condensed seminars last a maximum of four days an approach which Bovell says “offers employers the benefits of skills that can be applied at the workplace level in a relatively short period of time and which, he adds, is designed “to bring about short-term improvements in workplace effectiveness.”
In pursuit of this objective, TBS is seeking to attract both private and public sector entities to its courses, the disciplines of which include Project Management, Multi-Level Marketing, Team Building for Managers, Supply Chain Management, Social Media Marketing, Stress Management, Goal Setting and Risk Assessment, among others.
“There is no randomness in what we are offering here. Our courses have been selected and designed on the basis of research that points to particular skills needs, both current and emerging,” Bovell says.
The new TBS curriculum also provides for exposure to seminars that embrace other disciplines, including Women in Business, Human Resource Management, Employer Recruitment Strategies, Employer Productivity, Business Writing and Coaching and mentoring.
“Here again it is a matter of looking at emerging trends in both business and entrepreneurship and public sector management needs. We are attempting to speak directly to those skills needs in the orientation of our courses”, he said.
The TBS team, Bovell added, wants to engage employers and recruitment personnel from both the public and private sectors with a view to undertaking “needs assessment discourses” before having them sign on to courses that the School has to offer.
“At the level of the individual in the course of making employment or even longer-term career choices we can work with them on the basis of the choices that they might have already made with a view to helping them to get to where they want to go,” Bovell added.
Meanwhile, Bovell told Stabroek Business that aside from its mainstream curriculum, TBS will also be seeking to attract students to its Second Chance Remedial Training Programme, designed to afford an opportunity of re-entry into the conventional school system for “school dropouts or students left behind.” Bovell told the Stabroek Business that in the contemplation of its role as an educational institution, TBS believes that it should offer a ‘wide-ranging curriculum” that offers an opportunity for persons who may lack the skills and certificates needed for employment. “It is really a matter of helping them to equip themselves for further training and for the job market,” Bovell says.
Stabroek Business has seen a copy of TBS’ Second Chance Remedial Training Programme, which seeks, among other things, to improve participants’ academic ability in Mathematics, English, Information Technology and Social Studies and to enable them to be entered for the CXC examination within one or two years of enrolment with TBS.
Bovell told the Stabroek Business, meanwhile, that TBS is seeking to secure government involvement in the school’s “second chance programmes” if only for the reason that “governments have a responsibility to advance the lives of the disadvantaged. Noting that dropping out of school exposes youths to all types of risky behaviour including drug abuse, crime, violence and prostitution, Bovell said that “there are tremendous long-term financial and other costs incurred to remedy those consequences and studies have shown that government investment in second-chance programmes has a greater return than investment in adult training.”
As an element of the remedial programme, TBS is offering the compulsory Directing and Developing Daughters (DADD) and Directing and Developing Sons (DADS) programmes, which are designed to provide tools that would help to enhance relationships between daughters and sons, on the one hand and their respective parents, on the other. These programmes include modules covering a range of social issues, including daughters and domestic violence, daughters and early pregnancy, daughters and self -esteem, sons and values, sons and leadership and sons and discipline.
