Across the range of skills to drive the country’s development it has become painfully apparent that the scarcity that we are continue to experience is impeding the pace of our development and that unless urgent corrective measures are put in place there is a very real chance that we could be left behind.
The dilemma of scarce skills extends across the sectors and while, over the years, government, to a greater extent than the private sector has invested heavily in training, both at home and abroad, across a range of skills and disciplines, these days, both of the sectors are feeling the scarce skills pinch.
Up to several months ago Marlon Joseph was a young Public Servant with ambitions of upward mobility. It was not long before he begun to experience the suffocating effects of bureaucracy, not least what, frequently, is the sloth at which it moves and its proclivity for malfunction. He surmised that the deadening effect of the environment in a ‘government office’ was, in large measure, a function of a chronic lack of training. People may have had the good fortune of ‘being employed,’ but what, sometimes, is the arbitrariness with which public servants are assigned, it was patently evident that they were poorly trained or sometimes had received no training at all) for the tasks that they were required to routinely perform.
Across the private sector the situation was pretty much the same. Some of the well-established companies might have managed, over the years, to secure their own small cadres of management-trained employees. At the lower levels, however, underperformance linked to a lack of training was painfully prevalent.
Nor, Joseph recognized, was the local training institutions, including the University of Guyana ‘calibrated’ to respond to the particular training needs in either the public or private sectors. Those institutions were still locked in the traditional mold of training for qualifications rather than for jobs.
The creation by Joseph of the Professional Training Employment & Consultancy Services was conceptualized against the backdrop of what he felt was the need to undertake an assessment of the range of training deficiencies that existed at both the public and private sector levels and recruit qualified persons to deliver those courses. Up until now the company’s curriculum targets training in disciplines that include office administration, supervisory management, health and safety, information and communication technology, business crisis intervention, stress management and payroll and budgeting. Joseph says that PTEC’s focus on these disciplines derives from the company’s assessment of some of the areas in which skills are most needed. Since its establishment last year the company says it has secured an impressive list of local clients that include the Bank of Guyana, the Pegasus Hotel, the Correia Group of Companies, the Guyana Power and Light Company and Muneshwer’s Ltd.
Beyond training, PTEC has expanded its operations to include specialist recruitment, advertising design and placement, processing applications for jobs and conducting needs analyses for companies. During a recent interview Joseph told Stabroek Business that once the company had first encountered some of its clients it had discovered that those clients had other needs that it could satisfy.
Joseph told Stabroek Business that the pursuits currently being undertaken by PTEC are part of a sector that is continuing to grow. His assessment is that the likely change in the direction of the country’s economy afforded by the advent of oil and gas is bound to throw up new training needs and his 59 Second Street, Uitvlugt Pasture, West Coast Demerara office is preparing for that change. Having seen the training needs of the Public Service, PTEC is working to design courses which the company feels will best respond to the more critical needs of the public sector. When we met Joseph he was in the process of preparing a training proposal for one of the public sector agencies which, arguably, is most in need of various types of training – the Guyana Police Force.
Joseph says he believes that the emergence of an oil and gas sector has positioned the country for greatness on the international level. He asserts that PTEC seeks to infuse a high level of professionalism into the training services that it offers, aware as it is its services can impact significantly on the levels of efficiency in both the public and private sectors in the period ahead. “Employers and administrators would do well to set down with us soonest,” Joseph says.
