Don’t look down upon vocational training – Minister

Minister for Employment and Labour Relations, Nii Armah Ashietey, has urged parents and Ghanaians in general to discard the notion that vocational education is meant for school drop-outs, who could not make it to the secondary level.

According to him, education whether formal or informal, is the central pillar for decent work but added that this has not been the case for a very long time.

“Unfortunately, all along our education tends to be formal, focusing on general subject areas. There has been much preference for intellectual activities over manual work, white collar over blue collar jobs and academic education over training”.

The Minister was speaking at the 3rd Amnesty Training programme at the Kumasi Vocational Training Institute on Monday. About 40 trainees from Nigeria graduated from the Institute.

Nii Armah Ashietey reminded parents that about 70% of skills trained people easily get jobs, either through self-employment or wage employment. He added that vocational graduands also have equal opportunity to enter the universities to pursue further training.

He said President John Dramani Mahama, during his recent State of the Nation Address, reaffirmed government’s commitment to upgrade 10 existing polytechnics into universities.

This, the minister said, will easily pave the way for vocational trainees to also acquire high learning in addition to their skills.

He therefore urged young people to take advantage of the existing vocational facilities to acquire skills training in masonry, plumbing, auto mechanics, carpentry, welding and fabrication, weaving amongst others.

Nii Armah Ashiety also revealed that the Ministry is developing a Labour Market Information Systems ( LMIS) that will provide the country with labour market information to assist in policy planning and forecasting. With this establishment, we envisage to link job seekers to job providers, he added.

He reiterated that vocational and technical skills training constitute the major vehicle for socio- economic development of our country and therefore encouraged the youth to take advantage of the facilities provided by the various vocational and training institutions in the country to learn a trade or vocation to acquire skill to make them employable.

He congratulated the trainees for passing out successfully and urged them to use their skills to promote economic development.

The Nigerian Government sponsored the forty trainees who passed out at the KVTI