NYS Renewing Itself

The National Youth Service (NYS) is now placing greater emphasis on its management, having successfully assisted many young persons to access jobs as well as encouraging them to pursue further studies. Speaking with JIS News, Executive Director of the NYS, Reverend Adinhair Jones explained that the NYS would soon adopt a four-pronged approach that would seek to make the youth agency more efficient. He said that four specific perspectives were being examined.
The first was putting “emphasis on a value-based management organization”, he said. Explaining, Reverend Jones said performance scorecards for each staff member of the NYS would be implemented.
“We are always looking at what we are doing and making the appropriate evaluation, assessment and adjustment to ensure that we have a first world workforce that can help us make a transition and make the impact on the society,” he noted. The second perspective, he outlined, involved people. “We want the NYS to be seen in Jamaica in every household as a reputable organization that parents would want their children to enroll with,” the Executive Director said.
Noting that there was a stigma attached to the NYS as “just catering to the bottom of the society”, Reverend Jones said he wanted the youth agency to be seen as equally resourceful “to persons from the bottom and top of society”.
A third element of the NYS revamping exercise would include financing, where the agency would seek to become a self-sustaining one. “While we get help from the Government, we will highlight the fact that we provide a service that will be marketable and so garner support from the private sector and the wider corporate Jamaica,” he explained.
He pointed out that the NYS was looking toward mergers with companies, so the agency could substantially increase the number of young people who are trained through NYS programmes, to be able to find jobs with private sector companies.
Reverend Jones said the last element was a customer perspective, “to make the NYS marketable, not just to participants we are trying to reach, but any agency that will want to engage behaviour modification programmes that the NYS operates, whether in the workforce or by adopting a community or a school”.
He said the NYS was looking at the possibility of using its behaviour modification programmes as a product for sale. “We are now actively talking to some important private sector companies who are giving us favourable responses,” he added.
The NYS successfully places 1,400 young adults in various career fields each year, including teachers’ aides in basic, primary and all age schools; jobs in the Jamaica Constabulary Force, Jamaica Fire Brigade, Jamaica Defence Force and Correctional Services; and in the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) and the Forestry Department.