Education Minister Urges All Adults To Acquire Additional Skills

Minister of Education, Hon. Rev. Ronald Thwaites, is urging all adults with limited educational attainment to acquire additional skills and become certified, which will serve to improve their earning potential.

“Education makes you trainable; training makes you employable; employment makes you productive; and productivity makes you prosperous,” the Minister said.

He was addressing a forum on education, held at the Christ Church, in Vineyard Town, on December 1.

The Minister encouraged persons to take advantage of the Alternate High School Diploma programme offered by the Jamaican Foundation for Lifelong Learning (JFLL), which is internationally recognised in the United States, Canada and Britain.

“Many of us never got a chance to get a high school diploma. If you don’t know ‘A’ from ‘B’, let’s start there; if you have two subjects at Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) or General Certificate of Education (GCE), let’s start there,” he said.

Rev. Thwaites noted that persons could take as much or as little time they need to attain subjects, such as English, Maths, Social Studies, Science and Information Technology under the programme.

“It’s according to your time, but every adult in Jamaica must have the opportunity to improve themselves,” he said.

The Minister further encouraged adults to  seek to gain another skill through the offerings of the HEART Trust/National Training Agency (HEART Trust/NTA), or “where you don’t have a skill, or you have one and it’s not certified, it’s time now to upscale that.”

He pointed to the HEART Trust’s  recently rolled out ‘Career Coaches’, which are mobile units serving as an expansion of the institution’s delivery of technical and vocational training islandwide.

The coaches are being used as mobile offices to deliver the full suite of services provided by HEART’s Employment and Career Service (ECS) Department. These include: recruitment; applications processing; career services; employment services (employment facilitation), and on-the-job training through the School Leavers Training Opportunities Programmes (SL-TOPs); apprenticeship under the Registered Apprenticeship Programme (RAP); internship; and work experience.

The forum, dubbed: ‘Forum on Education: A Conversation on Education, Success for the Next Generation’, was the third in a series of conversations on various topics organised by State Minister for Science, Technology, Energy and Mining and Member of Parliament for South East St. Andrew, Hon. Julian Robinson, in his constituency.