By Karen Abrams MBA
To say that Guyana is poised for rapid economic development over the next decade would be an understatement. Most of the economic expansion will be driven by Guyana’s new oil & gas economy while Foreign Direct Investment remains a critical component of growing the economy.
In 2019, the Government of Guyana published its Green State Development Strategy (GSDS) which highlighted the priority development areas over the next 20 years. These included investment in agriculture, agro-processing, light manufacturing, renewable energy, tourism, and information and communications technology (ICT). Historically, transportation, communications, mining, and agriculture have been among the largest foreign direct investment sectors, but with the emergence of oil and gas in commercial quantities there is now a shift in the investment portfolio to reflect that new and changing dispensation. In 2022, the vast majority of Foreign Direct Investment remains in the oil & gas sector.
When Ministry of Foreign Affairs
official, Robert Persaud, spoke with members of the Guyanese community residing in Trinidad and Tobago, on Tuesday, March 22, at the Passage to Asia restaurant in Chaguanas, and shared that Guyana needs 100,000 additional workers and that a call had gone out for the Guyanese diaspora to consider returning home to build their country, Guyanese at home responded with a generous measure of incredulity. It was felt that what was not taken account of, was the fact that many of those jobs required a skills match and that the fact of thousands of unemployed young people in Guyana did not necessarily mean that they possessed the requisite skills to fill the positions which would become available. The reality is that Guyana, like most developing countries, have continually struggle in its efforts to deliver on promises to ‘deliver’ skilled persons to meet the country’s skills’ requirements.
Recently, the Ministry of Education launched its Get Ready for Opportunities to Work (GROW) programme which sought to offer a ‘second chance’ to Guyanese residing at home who had not been able to complete their secondary education. It is envisaged that these ‘second chance’ opportunities will be offered at no cost to the recipients under the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL).
The GROW programme is a further addition to several pre-existing public and private sector skills development programmes already being offered in Guyana. These programmes seek, for the most part, to fill the gaps in basic literacy and numeracy that exist at the level of the working-age populations. They prepare enrolled persons to sit for the critical regional exams required by universities and the public and private sectors.
Globally 750 million people aged 15-plus (or 18 per cent of the global population) report being unable to read and write, with estimates being nearly twice as large if literacy is measured through direct assessments. In Guyana’s rapidly growing economy, a small population of considerably below one million people leaves us at a significant disadvantage in circumstances where a substantial portion of the population is faced with literacy and numeracy challenges. There is an urgent need to correct this situation.
This problem, one hastens to add, is not unique to Guyana. Even those countries considered to be developed, continue to report a lack of skilled workers, citing the problem as a major challenge to the production process and to their ability to pursue innovative undertakings. This limitation should be viewed against the backdrop of the World Bank’s Skills Report which asserts that “the development of skills can contribute to structural transformation and economic growth by enhancing employability and labor productivity and helping countries to become more competitive. Investment in a high-quality workforce can create a virtuous cycle, where relevant and quality skills enable productivity growth and foreign direct investment, which result in more and better jobs for the current workforce and more public and private investment in the education and training system. This, in turn, increases the employability and productivity for both the current and future workforce.”
In the United States, the Pew Research Center reports that for US workers, “new skills and training” hold the key to future success. Employment growth is more rapid in occupations requiring higher social or analytical skills. It is reported that 83% of occupations require social skills, 77% require analytical skills, and 18% require physical skills. The emergence of automation and technology in general, have shifted job skills requirements to more of the ‘soft skills’.
As Guyana develops, there will be a growing need for young people who possess technical skills. However, even the industries that traditionally were labour intensive – oil & gas, construction, manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and healthcare will be increasingly supported by advanced technology tools which require that the technical employees of the future also possess strong analytical skills. All jobs will place a high value on job recruits who possess the ability to communicate effectively, collaborate, think critically, and problem solve -essentially the possession of important ‘soft-skills’.
According to the World Bank, some of the key skills development-related issues which countries need to tackle include (1) completion of education – across the globe; and 2) initiatives designed to compensate for the curriculum deficiencies that exist in some school systems.
Many young people who attend school fail to acquire even basic literacy skills, a circumstance that leaves them unable to compete in the job market. There are instances in which this condition afflicts more than 80 per cent of the entire working-age population in poor countries. Beyond that, among those who access technical and vocational training at secondary and post-secondary levels, returns can vary substantially by specialisation and institution.
While technical and vocational education and training can equip young people with the skills needed to compete for better-paying jobs, a great deal more needs to be done in terms of engaging local employers to ensure that these training programmes are responsive to labour market needs.
The challenges associated with governance, financing, and quality assurance, also impact the efficiency of skills development programmes. High costs, for example, can limit opportunities for disadvantaged youth and adults to access these programmes.
It has been suggested that there is a need for Guyanese to shift their thinking on the concept of a ‘good education’ from the achievement of the well-known academic goals (like high achievement at the CXC examination) or what is commonly described as “a good degree” from a recognized university to conceptualising education as a lifelong journey with the need for periodic skills-updating interventions. Contextually, skills-training programmes must be continually reviewed to ensure that recipients are being channelled into programmes that will result in better job opportunities and overall upward mobility. Education at the primary and tertiary levels must provide engaging and rewarding experiences for students in communities across the country, resulting in improvements in numeracy and literacy and the pushing back of school dropout rates which have the longer-term effect of retarding lifetime upward mobility opportunities.
Finally, it must be recognised that education at all levels can happen both inside and outside of the classroom. The learning experience for students must evolve enhanced project-based classroom experiences which serves to strengthen students’ critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and innovation skills, making the students much better prepared to contribute to their own self-enhancement as well as to the wider development of the society, as a whole.
