UG continuing efforts to strengthen local workforce with 30 new courses – Vice Chancellor

In light of Guyana’s rapid economic growth, the country’s premier tertiary institution the University of Guyana (UG) over the years has been implementing initiatives aimed at upskilling Guyanese citizens to bridge the labour gap.
This was revealed by Vice Chancellor of the institution Dr. Paloma Mohamed Martin during a recent edition of the Energy Perspectives podcast.
Speaking about the economic transformation that Guyana and the importance of quality during this phase the chancellor revealed that UG has a major role to play towards ensuring Guyanese are adequately trained to benefit from this expansion.
She noted that several labour studies revealed that Guyana will need thousands of workers to supply the needs of several key sectors, however, she explained that the current output rate of trained Guyanese at several major institutions is currently below what is required.
“We are going to need in the country at various levels, between 25,000 to 50,000 people trained in the next five years. When you compare that with what the output is now of the educational institutions in the country, not only universities, but GTI, the technical institutes, and so on we’re doing just under 40 per cent of what we are supposed to be doing right now” she stated.
On this point, the chancellor explained that the university over the past three years has taken several steps to address the issue of building a workforce for the future. One step the university has undertaken is to work with stakeholders from the primary level towards ensuring learners are adequately skilled when they are ready to enter the university.
“So UG has been really focused on several things, one is identifying and helping to strengthen the pipeline, what we call going all the way back into primary. Because we can’t wait until people are ready to get into the university and then you realise, they need this kind of mathematics. We have to work with everyone along the pipeline and we have a fairly good integrated relationship with the Ministry of Education and all, most of the institutions in the country” Martin said.
Moreover, she revealed that the country’s premier tertiary institution, in order to keep up with the needs of the country has reworked and expanded its curriculum to develop programmes particularly in the field of oil and gas.
“The second thing is to somewhat refine the curricula that we already had to bring them in synergy with what is needed and then to create a new curriculum. And so in the last four or five years, we have added about 30 new programmes inside the university and two institutes that are very specific to oil and gas. So, one of them is the Institute for Energy Diplomacy and the other one is the recent Institute for Marine and Riverine Economies and Ecologies” she stated.
Additionally, she noted that the university partnered with the Greater Guyana Initiative in 2018 to develop a programme which will accelerate STEM learners.
“We pioneered with the Greater Guyana Initiative in 2018, actually. But then we couldn’t do the project until after COVID because it involved children. This project is called the RAISER Project.
It’s a regional STEM students accelerator where we’ve taken 10 students who have done well at the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA). They must have had a good score in math and science and we take 10 from each region” she stated.
Students who are selected to be a part of this project are subjected to a curriculum which is similar to that of CXC.
The goal of the project is to continue the student’s involvement in STEM activities as well as to accelerate them to get into college one year ahead of their peers. Notably since its inception, the programme has been well received by students with only one student dropping out of the programme to date.