Provide skills training for job market, says Stern

WESTERN BUREAU:

JAMAICA LABOUR Party (JLP) stalwart politician, Michael Stern, is advising that Jamaica’s leadership should seek to provide skills training for young people in order to ensure they are qualified to fill the country’s most needed employment roles for national development.

Stern, a former state minister of industry, investment and commerce, made the call while addressing Sunday’s JLP divisional meeting at the Nain Basic School in Nain, St Elizabeth. The meeting was held in support of Delroy Hutchinson, the JLP’s councillor candidate for St Elizabeth’s Myersville division.

“We have to ensure that we identify persons, identify the skills they want, get them certified if they want a skill, and bring the people to them to be certified and to get them trained. The problem will get worse in terms of us trying to get more employed people if we do not do this,” Stern told the meeting.

“When you hear the minister of tourism (Edmund Bartlett) talk, he said he has 8,000 rooms at hotels to be built. That means it is in the pipeline already, and somebody started building them already, so where are you going to find the workers for that? We were complaining five years ago to say that we could not find jobs for young people to do, but now we have more jobs than we can find young people to take up,” Stern added.

He referenced a recent Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC) report that Jamaica’s unemployment rate up to April this year was six per cent.

“No other country in the Caribbean can talk about having unemployment at six per cent, and out of that six per cent, 7.7 per cent of it is women, but men are 4.4 per cent. But we have a lot of work to do, as we have a lot of people who are unskilled, who are not trained, who do not have the requisites to get a job,” said Stern.

“When have you ever seen with your eyes so much development going on? You know how many people want to build their house and cannot find a carpenter? You know how much people want a plumber and cannot find a plumber, or they want a mason and cannot find a mason? That means we have to ramp up the training,” Stern added.

A similar call was made in April this year by Lenworth Kelly, head of the Incorporated Masterbuilders Association of Jamaica, who urged the Government to give jobs to unattached Jamaican youth instead of giving employment to construction workers from overseas.

Dr Angela Brown Burke, the opposition spokesperson on education and training, likewise said at that time that the Government should take steps to increase the pool of skilled workers to fill vacancies instead of importing workers to fill gaps in the construction industry.

Earlier this month, EPOC Chairman Keith Duncan said that with Jamaica having approximately 500,000 people who are currently not in the local workforce, to include 250,000 young people who are still in school, programmes must be instituted to train youngsters for the job market.