Hundreds of jobs are soon to become available in Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne) with the opening of two telemarketing companies. This is according to Finance Dr Ashni Singh, who said that the two new call centres will be located at Palmyra and the Upper Corentyne.
According to Dr Singh, both facilities are being constructed under a Public/Private Partnership (PPP).
“At Palmyra, we are constructing a physical facility which is going to be operated as a call centre and we expect that we will have a private operator to operate that facility. Similarly, we are doing the same thing on the Upper Corentyne. We will be constructing a similar facility there where there will also be a physical facility which a private operator will operate.”
Each of the facilities will have the capacity for 150 seats. “So you can have 150 persons working at any given time, but of course for many of these companies [telemarketing], depending on where their clients are and the nature of the clients that they have they could do multiple shifts as well. So, in theory, a 150-seat facility could easily be 300 jobs and at the limit, it could be as many as 450 jobs if you have three shifts operating in the facility,” Minister Singh explained.
He pointed out that as the world changes there will be a difference in the labour requirements. That is why, he added, the Government has been investing in training persons in ICT education. “There is a very traditional type of jobs the Guyanese economy has become accustomed to but as we undergo this transformation that the President has been speaking about, there are new types of jobs and new types of skills being required for those new types of jobs – this is all part of the transformation that is taking place. It is important that young people and potential job seekers procure themselves for these new job types. That is why programmes like the GOAL Scholarship is so important,” Dr Singh added while noting that the world is rapidly changing.
