Towards the end of Dec 2019, four years after its first strike in its Stabroek Field, Exxon announced the start of oil production in our country and three years later we are producing 360,000bpd heading towards 1million bpd. With US$1B in our NRF, we are well on way to being a significant global oil producer. However, rather than preparing Guyanese to participate in the industry and the industrialization and infrastructural development that was sure to follow, the then APNU/AFC coalition government appeared oblivious of the need to retool our educational institutions. We need to ask what type of education are they supposed to produce for our country?”
We would then be joining a larger debate and discourse that is ongoing in the developed world. They have been forced into this introspection by their economic collapse since 2008. With no light evident at the end of their tunnel, and facing a crisis in their manufacturing capabilities after decades of depending on China, they realise that much deadwood in the halls of academia will have to be jettisoned. And they are not only questioning just the number of PhD’s that are being churned out in obscure fields and even more obscure topics. A hard look is being cast at the relevance of the undergraduate programs.
The bottom line, the powers that be are asserting, is whether the degree awarded is worth the investment which was heavily supported by student loans that have to be now written off. On their own, students have also been asking this question. One of their response has been to desert programs in ‘humanities and ‘language’ in droves and head into fields that are directly connected to available jobs such as in the technical and health fields.
In Guyana, the need for this sort of introspection seems to have finally hit both students and administrators. Do we actually need all those graduates in Sociology or International Relations from UG? Are we not just creating trouble for ourselves when the young (and not so young) graduates in those fields cannot find employment? But one development in the US that addresses the need to provide academic knowledge and industry-specific training points in a direction in which we have some experience and which we hopefully can introduce quite quickly: apprenticeships. And since we tend to only copy what is common ‘overseas’, maybe our educators may take notice?
In recent decades, we seem to have bypassed the apprenticeship system, introduced in the sugar industry since the fifties. We’ve opted for some nebulous “internship” system that really do not provide the background and training for its graduates to step into any available jobs. They still need further academic “university” teaching. Apprenticeships, of course, combine paid on-the-job training with college-level (Polytechnics) or trade-school classes. The Booker’s Apprenticeship Training Programme (now GuySuCo’s) was immensely successful for decades and can become the model for expanding our apprenticeship schemes. The PPP Government has already added an Oil and Gas component to the Port Morant Apprentice facility, while there has been a privately funded one opened on East Coast Demerara. The Government Technical Institutes in all three counties can be adjusted to include apprentices from private companies.
Apprenticeship programmes make economic sense because specific companies – such as the ones now sprouting due to the Local Content requirement for the Oil Industry and in the now liberalised information and communication technology sector, for instance should not have to look outside the country to fill their personnel needs. In the US, the Department of Labour is trying to expand apprenticeship models in high-demand fields like health care, green jobs, transportation, and information technology.
Another challenge with the Technical Institute model that we are expanding would be to offer their graduates the assurance of specific skills that employers need. The apprenticeship scheme, by combining the employers with the institutions and the specific training, removes that doubt. It also allows corporations, to more directly absorb the costs of training their employees.
