Dear Editor,
“For example, in education, we are investing heavily in early childhood education, universal primary and secondary education, improving access to and quality of tertiary education, strengthening technical and vocational education, improving learning outcomes at all levels, and ensuring lifelong learning…”
The preceding quote, extracted from SN’s column of April 07, 2021 offers great potential for human resources development in this country. Hopefully, the optimistic projections will soon be translated into a comprehensive human resources development strategy that will be intelligible to all concerned parties, primarily the institutions and agents who would be required to deliver quality products – albeit for an undisclosed market.
According to an advertisement in the press the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) would appear to be the facilitator in coordinating the distribution of up to 20,000 scholarships over the next five years – in a range of personally selected subject areas; apparently without reference to at least local employers, or any consultation amongst public sector agencies. Further, it would appear that local education and training institutions, such as the University of Guyana, have been excluded from participating in these GOAL exercises.
Since the admixture of programmes are predicted to range from periods of two months to three years, in the latter case including PhD certification, it must be presumed that teachers and lecturers will emerge to satisfy yet undetermined needs. In this connection however, GOAL would not appear to be participating in the critical area of ‘early childhood education’. The question therefore needs to be answered as to who are the prospective partners in coordinating and delivering this very sensitive area of human resources development. To what extent will, for instance, Parent-Teachers’ Associations be involved in a conversation that must address the safe mental and physical growth of generations over an unpredictable pandemic future.
In the new online dispensation parents/guardians/elders/ will have to be so much more proactive. They will have to monitor access to social media that are likely to contain portrayals that very likely reinforce the misbehaviours of pontificating national and international leaders. In the milieu it is just likely to be little difference between precept and practice. Then there is the concern about vocational education, immediately involving physical and systemic structures that will accommodate deliverables from newly conceptualised human resources capabilities – in order to satisfy new variants of the construction and engineering skills pandemic.
Regarding the Public Service only, the latest figures accessible – 2019 – in relation to ‘Semi-skilled Operatives & Unskilled’ categories of employees who should be eligible for vocational training are as per the following sample:
Are these the performers to be upgraded? But for those who know not better there is also the curious category of ‘Other Technical & Craft Skilled’ which includes, certainly on the face of it, some interesting contradictions:
The above, however, is a very minimal indicator of the need for a most comprehensive job evaluation exercise – one repeatedly recommended, including in the Commission of Inquiry Report into the Public Service of 2016. For obviously, attention needs to be given to the levels of pay in a promised prosperous economy.
But perhaps the more demanding need is for a very fundamental restructuring of the Teaching Service Commission, conceived in colonial times and which remains constipated in the grading and evaluation of teachers’ compensation at all levels. How the existence of 28 salary scales could be justified when, for starters, the first two grades, TSI (A) and TSI (B), have Minimum and Maximum exactly the same – $66,844 monthly in 2019? Meanwhile the highest Grade is described as SPECIAL and suffers the same constipation of the Maximum being the same as the Minimum – $301,085. What a future to look forward towards retirement! The creative politicians have never noticed over the past two decades, that they (and children) were taught by these devoted servants.
But none of the foregoing is new, except for the pandemic dimensions that demand commitment to change – a fact obviously recognised by the creative designers of an ambitious developmental programme. It does not mean however that ingenuity would not be further tested in the formulation of a variety of contracts not only with respect to various scholarship levels and periods, but, more incisively, the conditions of employment by differing public sector institutions, occasionally confused by the fact that some scholarship winners would have been previously employed somewhere.
It therefore would never be too premature to require those agencies to predict their future technical and managerial needs. For in addition to winning a scholarship you must be assured of winning a suitable job. All the above must be climaxed with the reintroduction of a comprehensive performance appraisal system in order to measure the return on investment. But in the final analysis none of this hullabaloo is worth discussion if candidates like Lisa Budhu of Black Bush Polder cannot access online connection.
Sincerely,
E.B. John
