Across the range of skills that are necessary to drive the country’s development it has become apparent that the scarcity that we continue to experience in critical areas could have a serious negative impact in the period ahead. Skills scarcity has become even more of a national talking point with the advent of oil as an emerging industry. Setting aside the scarcity of conventional administrative and specialist skills demanded by both the public and private sectors, including those associated with the quality of service delivery, oil & gas is likely to bring its own particular skills challenges which, up until recently, had not been taken account of in the national training curriculum.
Not too many months ago Marlon Joseph was a young public servant with the customary ambition of upward mobility. Before long, however, he began to come to terms with the reality of ingrained deficiencies within public sector service delivery. Such training as was taking place, he observed, continued to fall short of meeting the particular requirements of a modern administrative system. Sloth and a capacity for malfunction were weaknesses that he had identified. These, he surmised, were, in large measure, functions of lack of training for recruits into the system who had been hired on the basis of conventional qualifications rather than any serious assessment of whether or not they possessed the skills necessary for them to perform the functions that they were assigned.
In the private sector Joseph saw similar weaknesses. Some of the long-standing business enterprises may have managed, over the years, to secure their own cadres of suitably trained employees. Rising enterprises, however, were not so fortunate. They too continued to be afflicted by the ‘hit or miss’ consequences of recruitment policies that frequently failed to meet their particular needs.
With local institutions, including the University of Guyana not always ‘calibrated’ to respond to many public and private sector training needs, Joseph decided that there existed a niche for training that sought to respond, relatively quickly and effectively to some of the more glaring deficiencies and workplace service delivery weaknesses. It was out of this assessment that he fashioned his own training entity, the Professional Training Employment & Consultancy Services (PTEC) located at 59 Second Street, Uitvlugt Pasture.
If he had come to understand the overarching nature of the skills deficiency challenge, Joseph himself remained challenged to understand where the specific weaknesses lay. Over some months, however, he came to an understanding of just where the shoe ‘pinched’ in workplaces insofar as training was concerned. In consultation with specialists in various areas, he put PTEC to work to conceptualise the appropriate curricula in an effort to respond to what he perceived to be some of the training needs of the public and private sectors. This exercise involved partnering with specialised
qualified trainers who could deliver the specialised training that had been diagnosed for the particular agencies.
Up until now PTEC’s efforts have met with a fair measure of success. One of its accomplishments has been in targeting performance gaps in local institutions in areas that include office administration, supervisory management, workplace health & safety, and information & communication technology. PTEC also targets businesses directly with programmes that embrace business crisis intervention, stress management and payroll and budgeting. Once a needs assessment is done, the company engages and contracts specialists to deliver courses tailor-made to meet the requirements of the client.
Since its establishment last year the company has secured an impressive list of public and private sector clients including 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.
