JHTA wants earn-and-learn programme for high-school students

WESTERN BUREAU:

CLIFTON READER, president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA), wants an earn-and-learn system for high-school students to be developed in the tourism industry to fast-track the training and recruitment of much-needed skilled workers to meet the demands that will come with a full recovery to the industry next year.

The tourism sector is steadily rebounding after it was affected in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, an experience that has also seen an exodus of workers, who have moved on to establish their own restaurant businesses, taken up jobs in the business process outsourcing sector, plus migrating in search of a sustainable income.

Already, the Ministry of Tourism has projected that if all things are synchronised as planned, Jamaica could by the third quarter of 2023 welcome 4.3 million visitors, which will be a repeat of its 2019 figures.

According to the JHTA boss, while the ministry’s Hospitality and Tourism Management Programme (HTMP) has trained and graduated just under 400 workers in the last four years of the programme, there is need for a much faster turnaround of trained workers.

“Right now it takes about nine months to train a waiter or a housekeeper, (but) I can train that person in seven weeks,” Reader told reporters on Friday in Montego Bay. He was speaking on the sideline of a press conference, hosted by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett at the Montego Bay Convention Centre – to provide an update of the HTMP since its inception.

“If we look at the gap in terms of the numbers that we are going to need for 2023, we need to do something faster,” noted Reader, who is also the managing director of Moon Palace Jamaica resort, which is located in Ocho Rios, St Ann.

“There needs to be an earn-as-you-learn situation, where you bring in the people from high schools, put them into the hotels and the training takes place, using the cutting-edge equipment that we have, so that when they come to us they don’t have a start-up time any more. They would have been used to what we do, they would have been trained over the seven weeks, and you can develop them to the diploma level over time,” the senior hotelier said.

The HTMP provides students with the requisite skills training and enables competence certification to gain an entry-level qualification in the tourism industry.

Under the programme, students graduate with an occupational associate degree in customer service, National Vocational Qualification of Jamaica Level -4 certification, Customer Service Industry Association recognition, and the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute certification.