Golding bats for greater skills training

Prime Minister Bruce Golding has praised the work of World Skills Jamaica, while at the same time challenging the organisation to further improve the skills movement.

Golding was speaking at the 60th anniversary conference of world skills at the Wyndam Hotel in New Kingston on Saturday night.

The prime minister said that although Jamaica is making strides in the pursuit of skills as a means to diversify the manufacturing and service industries, the nation is still faced with a monumental challenge in developing marketable skills. He attributed this to flaws within the construction and delivery of education, noting that more emphasis must be placed on developing skills.

Beyond academics

Golding said that, for too long, the academic model had been the sole interest of students leaving high school, and that the world had rapidly moved beyond just academics.

"The globalisation of the market in which skills are applied, goods are sold, makes it necessary to see this endeavour promoting skills as a global issue in which we must work together and strengthen each other," Golding said.

He said the Ministry of Education was involved in a process of recalibration.

"The minister of education and his team have been leading a quiet revolution. It involves recalibrating the structure and the content and the methodology of the learning process; it involves reorienting attitudes and seeing education not just as through diligence through curriculum subjects, but as encouraging and facilitating the acquisition of knowledge," he said.

The Heart Trust/NTA, which facilitated the hosting of the general assembly of World Skills International, has been given the charge of leading the skills-training movement.

Over 200 delegates

Jamaica hosted its fourth annual National Skills Competition and welcomed over 200 delegates from 53 countries.

"Through the efforts of Heart/NTA a national treasury, through its development of our human capital in the area of skills training and management, Jamaica is once again positively positioned on the international scene," Custos of Kingston Steadman Fuller said.

The island's involvement in World Skills International started in 2002.