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Students’ wages expectation in the workforce are unrealistic – NWG Coordinator
A troubling phenomenon that could potentially impact the labour force and by extension the society, is the fact that
Mr Randolph Williams
there are many students who are training for careers that will merely afford them a fraction of the wage they anticipate. This assertion was on Tuesday made by Project Coordinator of the National Working Group (NWG), Mr. Randolph Williams, during a seminar at the National Centre for Educational Resource Development, Kingston, Georgetown.
“Sometimes you have students going into fields and when you ask them how much do you expect to earn from this occupation, you find that their expectation of a wage is far greater than the occupation that they are training for,” said Williams as he offered his input into a discussion that was mainly focused on Technical, Vocational and Education Training (TVET).
According to Williams, the view of the NWG is that if there is a more efficient labour market in place, it will undoubtedly guard against the inefficiency of the allocation of skills. And this, he believes, will help to meet the demand and supply of the market whereby the rate of unemployment is likely to decline; as people will be in a better position to acquire information on what jobs are available. With people better au fait with the available vacancies they will be able to appropriately qualify themselves, Williams noted.
Moreover, he lauded the collaborated move by the TVET Council and the Ministry of Labour, with financial and technical support from the Inter-American Development Bank, to conduct an informative Labour Market Survey.
“We see this survey as being a part of that initiative to get information out to those people who are planning their careers, so that they can train and equip themselves to enter the labour force and especially to deal with the wage rates,” Williams noted. He therefore noted that it is not only important to be aware of the skills that are in short supply but also it is imperative to know their actual worth.
In order to remain aware of the state of the labour market, Williams said that efforts must be made to ensure that Labour Market Surveys are conducted on a regular basis. And this should not be a major challenge, the NWG Representative said as he alluded to the Ministry’s of Education Statistical Digest. “I see no reason why we cannot have a Labour Market Survey done every year…we can do it the same way using Government resources, and the benefits of doing this are enormous,” he categorically added.
Primary among the benefits, he noted, will be the reduction of wasted resources used to facilitate training for areas that are not even needed on the labour market. “That reduction of wasted resources we can plug into other areas so that we can realise more efficiency,” Williams continued.
But in commenting on the survey that was recently completed, he expressed concern that among the requirements that a great number of employers are seeking is that of prior experience. “I don’t know how our youths are going to get training if our firms do not make provision for on the job training,” said Williams as he turned his attention to the issue of migration.
The migration factor, he pointed out, is in fact one that has been plaguing the labour market. “Our more experienced people, after they have been trained in our technical institutes, they leave and that is an enormous loss to the system…So I would expect that our firms will have a very significant gap in the amount of skilled and experience personnel that they desire,” observed Williams.
In speaking to the need for more private sector involvement in helping to craft a suitable labour market, Williams shared his conviction that “perhaps we have to do a great deal of advocacy to get our private firms to subscribe to this…They feel that it is a cost but it is really an investment in the productivity of the firm and its programmes.”
The NWG is a private/public partnership initiative designed to encourage private sector input to accelerate the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals. Moreover, a primary aim of the NWG is to help enhance access to key factors such as financing, skills training and poverty reduction through job creation and provision of basic services.
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