President John Dramani Mahama has reiterated his government’s desire to prioritise technical and vocational training and education should he get a second term.

He said technical and vocational education and training is not a shameful course for the unintelligent, as many Ghanaians perceive it to be for school drop outs.

Speaking at the commissioning of one of the 123 Community Day senior high schools in the Krobo in the Bono Ahafo Region, Thursday, he pointed out that there are several openings springing up much faster to engage graduates with these skills and qualification.

Comparing job prospects for those who are flocking to read courses like humanities, President Mahama said jobs in that sector are not readily available unlike those with vocational and technical training.

The president believes there is a concentration of training people for certain professions with courses like humanities, which is part of the reason for the nation’s unemployment problem.

“There are only a number of graduates that a particular sector can take. And so if all the schools are training people in that sector, of course, the will come out and there is saturation,” he said.

President Mahama made similar calls during the 2016 manifesto highlight presentation at the Banquet Hall of the State House in September.

Promised he would work to change the wrong perception by building a new college of education to train instructors to teach technical skills. That College of Education will be sited in Agona Swedru, he emphasised.

The world he said is demanding new skills including Ghana with her oil and gas discovery and lots of industries and businesses coming up.

President Mahama bemoaned the fact that there is a huge demand for skilled manpower and the many worrying cases of Ghana having to import manpower from abroad.

He said this is because some of the investors cannot find the skills they want locally or they think Ghana have not trained them [graduates] efficiently where they can do the job properly so they [companies] have to resort to importing them [skilled hands] from elsewhere.

The President disclosed cases of manpower having to be imported from neighbouring countries especially in the construction business.

"I have encountered many tile layers and masons who are from one of our neighbouring countries," he revealed.

According to him, that is the reason why government is prioritising technical and vocational education to train more people for industry, agriculture, manufacturing, oil and gas and the SME’s .

President Mahama said in his second term industry will be linked with the technical and vocational training institutes so they have a database of graduates to know the number of people graduating in particular field.

This he believes would make it for easy absorption into industry to practicalise what they learned in school.

myjoyonline.com