BUSINESS MONDAY: TVET Council adapted but still affected by COVID-19

Recently, Executive Director of the TVET Council, Henderson Eastmond, acknowledged that the Council had been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and certification was down.

Eastmond stated that the entity had been seriously affected regarding the technical, hands-on training segments of the courses. He was speaking during an interview with the media, after the official launch of the six-week coalition between the TVET Council and the SRB Training Spa, featuring training for massage therapists in the area of oncology massage for cancer patients.

The executive director explained that the entity was a tripartite council, where members of the private sector, government and trade unions were part of the Council and partnering was within the veins of the TVET Council.

“We work with the various training institutions keeping standards in curriculum and we depend on them for the delivery of the training. We are being careful that we are not duplicating what they are doing, we are cutting edge, we are filling gaps with things they are not doing, to bring them to the island,” said Eastmond.

The director said that despite the pandemic, initially the Council was ahead of the game as they had already been working with an online, ‘work from home’, strategy.

“When the Prime Minister closed the country down, we just shifted home. We were already prepared to work from home as on occasion some of the staff members would work from home, so we had that ability long before the pandemic,” said the executive director.

However, he contended that though they transitioned well as a Council regarding administration, the work being done through the technical training institutions had been hard hit.

“Yes it has affected us in our programme regarding the CVQs, as you know technical education has a heavy hands-on component and for most of the institutions, they could not put that on. This was across the world, most of the institutions were closed and they could only teach the cognitive part of the courses online,” he explained.

Due to the inability to teach the practical portion of the courses, the director said that the certification levels of the Council had slowed down significantly, as it waited for those cohorts to now complete the practical part of the training.

“People have gone to the training institutions, but they could not be in them during lockdown and could not complete the course and be certified unless they showed that they are competent in the practical part. So they are now back in and doing that and we expect a new wave of certifications in the next couple of months, provided things remain safe to do so,” he said.

As to how many institutions were affected, Eastmond said that all of them had to deal with the pandemic, including the Barbados Vocational Training Board, the Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology, the Barbados Community College and many other private training institutions across Barbados. (AS)