Bring alternatives to eight-hour jobs � Molutsi
Baboki Kayawe | Tuesday September 1, 2015 16:36
Moreover, the fact that people are naturally attracted to jobs with good remunerations means that in hard economic times, the country cannot afford to pay decent salaries.
This was said by the acting Chief Executive Officer of the Human Resource Development Council (HRDC), Dr Patrick Molutsi at an education and training consultative forum yesterday.
As a result, people would do with more than just one source of income when and if freed from an eight-hour schedule, he said.
Molutsi was responding to a comment from an attendee who was of the opinion that the reason why some jobs in the country remained vacant was because the price of labour is very low.
“While government is concerned about the cost of training and the fact that despite all the investment in education, skills produced are not relevant to labour market needs, we need to be equally worried about the price of labour in the country. It is very low,” said Kolawole Oleadeai, a consultant in the education sector.
Once again, the forum discussed the challenge of skills mismatches and market unready graduates.
The mismatch in the demand and supply of labour has been sung so loud and has in turn lead to a scenario where graduates are jobless. Some jobs are without people.
Coupled with poor work ethic, the problem is said to be threatening productivity, innovation and economic prosperity. As a result, a majority of the locals are either not skilled or are just semi-skilled, according to Molutsi.
It is against this background that the HRDC nominated members of the education and training committee sector to find solutions to the matter.
According to the human resource custodian, this committee is tasked with developing sector-based human resource development to align training and labour market demand.
“The committee will guide the skills needs and requirements of the sector as well as develop responses of how to tackle the identified needs,” explained Molutsi on the sidelines of the meeting.
Earlier this year the HRDC announced an audit of tertiary education programmes in order to measure employability and their impact in the economy.
The setting up of the committee, Molutsi explained, is part of that process as members will look critically into these courses and eliminate those seen as having no impact to the economy. The committee, made up of diverse expertise in the education fraternity will also examine the curricula to ensure that it is in line with contemporary labour market needs and solutions to the economy, further explained Molutsi. While he admits that the issue of skills mismatch has been on the agenda for a long time, he said in order for it to be addressed, all stakeholders need to go about it comprehensively.
To this end the HRDC through the Botswana Chambers of Mines is re-tooling about 100 artisans to address lack of qualified and market ready technicians. They are trained in partnership with experts from Germany in a three-year study programme, explained Molutsi.
Another strategy to eliminate the mismatch saw the HRDC labour advisory committee involved in determining the quota for tertiary education admissions as well.
“We do not want to rush this. If we rush the process, like we unfortunately rushed enrollments in the early 2000s when the main concern was access to tertiary education, we ended up having people trained in the wrong fields. That won’t solve the problem at hand,” he said.