ANOTHER WORK PERMIT APPLICATION has found its way on the pages of our daily newspapers. This time it is from the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation, an arm of Government.
A job in the field of agriculture with a description “Product Development Specialist – Crops” is required by the above-mentioned entity, but having received no suitable applications for the post, it is asking the Chief Immigration Officer for a work permit.
Work permits for non-nationals are regular features in local publications, especially in specialist and non-traditional areas of work. But when employers are seeking workers for jobs involving scuba diving, tree-cutting, steel-bending, agriculture, finance, marketing, sales and so on, and cannot recruit suitable local people, then how can we boast of our educational system being of a quality and kind that is the envy of other countries?
For many years, a number of private global and regional companies have advertised for work permits on the basis of having not received suitable local applicants for traditional mainstream jobs. One would not wish to believe that the baton is being dropped. A number of Government departments and agencies should be putting heads together to unravel the phenomenon of not having suitably qualified Barbadians for jobs in areas considered routine, mainstream and traditional.
It is of critical importance that the Ministries of Education, Human Resources, Labour, Commerce, Trade and Business, in conjunction with the Barbados Accreditation Council, University of the West Indies and other tertiary education and training institutions, arrange a series of symposia in order to determine the cause(s) for the scarcity of appropriately qualified Barbadian workers.
Questions are being repeatedly asked:
• What are we teaching our children?
• Are we teaching the right things?
• Is our teaching and training in line with national development goals?
Something must be done to reduce employers’ complaints that too many Barbadians are not educated for the world of work, as well as to lessen the month-after-month advertisements requesting work permits for non-nationals.
– MICHAEL RAY