With the aim of creating more high-value job opportunities for Guyanese, President Dr Irfaan Ali has announced a new training initiative that will be rolled out in the new year and will see high-paying job opportunities being secured for beneficiaries.
During his feature address at the Private Sector Commission’s 31st Anniversary Gala and Awards Ceremony, President Ali disclosed that in the new year, Government would be making a lot of investments in building human capacity, and enhancing institutions and innovations in Guyana.
One such initiative, he highlighted, is a training-to-job programme that will see Guyanese benefiting from high-paying job opportunities after undergoing training in specific areas.
“So, what we will be doing in 2024 is launching a specific programme where we will be targeting 2000 Guyanese in the first phase, training them in essential skills certified by the best who give those certifications and aligning them with jobs. The average salary for the lower scale of these jobs I’m talking about will be about US$30,000 annually,” the Head of State noted.
According to President Ali, Guyana will be working with its partners from Canada to provide these training opportunities for Guyanese.
The Guyanese Leader went on to add that the Government has also engaged several of the large international operators in Guyana to also provide these high-value jobs for locals.
“We have already raised with Exxon and other partners, other major multinationals operating in Guyana, who are outsourcing jobs, that they have to work with us in providing some of those jobs in Guyana. So, they will outsource to Guyana and Guyanese in Guyana,” he explained.
Between 2021 and 2023, more than US$3.5 billion in investments were made in the local Private Sector, thus creating more job opportunities here.
The majority of these jobs were created in the services, agriculture and manufacturing sectors which, according to President Ali, is reflective of his Administration’s push to diversify the country’s economy.
During his presentation to the Private Sector, the Head of State pointed out that there were job opportunities available for engineers, engineering technicians, and doctors as well as nurses. In fact, he renewed calls for persons interested in nursing as a career to join the Government’s programme that will see them not only receiving training but also a stipend during that period along with a guaranteed job upon completion of the course.
After years of losing trained nurses to developed countries, the Guyana Government of recent has been employing various measures to boost the cohort of nurses in the public sector. Only back in July, President Ali pitched a solution whereby Guyana and Canada would be working together to provide the human resource assets needed to address the deficits in healthcare sectors.
He had stated that many local healthcare workers were doing specialised training and studies at various institutions in Canada, whether through distance learning, face-to-face contact, or through trainers coming to Guyana. As such, President Ali had pitched positioning Guyana as a key destination for the provision of human resources for the healthcare sector especially in the Caribbean region.
“I want to position Guyana as an important destination for the provision of regional human resource assets to meet the skill deficit of countries around the Region. And here is where I think there is tremendous opportunity for Canada and Guyana, in which we are building the infrastructure for training institutions to train for global needs,” the Head of State had noted.
President Ali went on to encourage Canadian-accredited institutions to establish a footprint in Guyana. “For the training of nurses to meet your own demand; for the training of medical technicians to meet your own demand, and also to meet the regional demand. This, in turn,” Ali said, “will also benefit Guyana.”
He had outlined, too, that his Government would push to have its training centres for nurses accredited by Canadian standards.
“We’re going to be opening up discussion with our development partners in having our nursing institutions and other institutions accredited by your standard. I believe that if our nurses are good enough to be recruited from the training they received right here within Caricom, we’re good enough to sell that service to train them to the rest of the world. And that is a business opportunity that we’re working on to create in Guyana, an avenue for global training and global education,” the Guyanese Leader had disclosed.
At the time in July, it was reported that more than 1200 Guyanese were registered in nursing programmes nationally. Government had also launched a hybrid nursing programme which is intended to increase the training of nurses from 150-200 per year to between 1000 and 1500 per year.
Moreover, Government has also been ramping up its training programmes in order to expand and improve its human resource assets in the healthcare sector. In addition to specialised training for nurses via post-graduate programmes there are plans to offer more post-graduate programmes to specialise more doctors in the field of neurology as well as to increase the training for various categories of doctors, including surgeons, gynaecologists, and paediatricians.
