Need to engage employers, says CEO
Published on: Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Kota Kinabalu: The Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) development in the country is on the right path but more investment, especially in engaging employers, would be needed to make it a success."You cannot expect success by spending RM100,000 and hope for the best. In the UK, one organisation spends around £17 million just to engage with employers. Obviously, we are not expecting Malaysia to do that, but it is to show you the scale of our efforts in engaging employers," said CEO and founder of Global Skills Ledger, Jonathan Ledger (pic).A big question that lingers in the minds of educators, he said, remains the question of employment and whether employers are willing to provide apprenticeships to those who opted for TVET rather than traditional academic training.ADVERTISEMENT Ledger, however, said the idea that employers would want something in return for providing apprenticeship could not be further from the truth."If you engage employers, you will understand them better. You will know what problems they have, what skills, what are their ambitions as business, what is the gap between the current skill that they need and the current skill that they have."Through this investigation, you can then demonstrate a solution that TVET can offer to fill that gap," he said.In the UK, he said 250,000 youngsters are choosing to go on TVET while around a million more matured individuals are going into TVET later on in life.ADVERTISEMENT Education, he said, should not be thought to be a one-time thing but a lifetime learning and TVET is the best way to do that where learners could learn and earn at the same time.The main problem with encouraging TVET among the more academic-minded society, he said, is the mentality that TVET is lesser than an academic qualification and should only be pursued when there is nothing else on the table.
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"My 16-year-old granddaughter chose to go on an apprenticeship while the rest of her classmates went on their five-week holiday. Some parents thought this is a bad thing. Everyone else in her 90-student class went on to colleges or universities."She is now 19, she has a car and a job, she earns £25,000 a year thanks to her apprenticeship, and she has work experience. How on earth can an apprenticeship be bad for a young person? Somebody who goes to college is still depending on mom and dad, does not have a car, can't pay rent and can't buy anything."Here we have 89 young people absorbing money out of the tax system who don't really have any work experience and when they leave universities at 22 or 23, they are going to apply for jobs that would require work experience which they do not have because they were in college. So don't tell me that apprenticeship does not work for young people. It does," he said.The idea of education has been so warped that parents only accepted that a degree is equal to education instead of a useful work experience, he said.Furthermore, he said, apprenticeship is not a one-way street that only benefits trainees but not the companies that provide it.According to a survey, he said an overwhelming 96 per cent of employers claimed that apprenticeship benefited the organisation business-wise."Developing TVET, however, is not a walk in the park. I am speaking through experience and I say that if you want to do it, aim for the best. You don't go climb Mt Everest by taking a helicopter to the summit. You have to go from Base 1 to Base 2 and so on.Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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"It is a painful and hard climb. Government changes, global demand changes and we have to shift the game. The good thing is, we have gone through all those painful years. So we have a lot of expertise and the best practices and we can show you how to do it," he said. - Tracy Patrick