Wayne Chen, President of the Caribbean Employers’ Confederation and a member of the CARICOM Human Resource Development Commission.
Develop your skills
Thu, 05/28/2020 - 6:57am
Youth told to upgrade their abilities for post-COVID period
By:
Regina Selman-Moore
Education and training will be key for the region’s youth going forward, as countries seek to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wayne Chen, President of the Caribbean Employers’ Confederation and a member of the CARICOM Human Resource Development Commission, suggested the above, as he spoke on the topic, “Jobs, Work and Opportunities in the post-COVID Caribbean”, during the CARICOM Girls in ICT Partnership 2nd Digital Dialogue, which was held virtually, yesterday.
“Education and training is of paramount importance, in everything that we do. One of the things that we have failed to do in our education, is not to instil the love of learning and the understanding that continuous learning is important. One of the things that we have tended to do, is teach by rote and teach our young people to memorise a lot of facts, which has really become obsolete in this time, where facts are always at our fingertips,” Chen asserted.
“What is more important is to teach us how to learn, teach us how to adapt, teach us how to find the new opportunities and find them quickly. So the transformation of our education in terms of content, in terms of delivery, will mean new thinking and new jobs, a re-tooling of what is there and in addition, a bolstering up of the STEM subjects, Mathematics in particular, but in many other subjects, then in the soft skills that we would have to impart through formal education, where they are not being imparted at home,” he added.
He stressed that in the future, it will be not so much about what the youth can learn, but what they can do.
“What I suggest you do is find a basket of skills that you are interested in and learn as much as you can about it. If you decide you love graphic design, you can teach yourself graphic design virtually online now and you can sell your work online. So my advice to every young person now, is learn, learn, learn, and keep on learning and never lose the love and the passion and the zeal for learning. That is the first point” he advised.
“The second point is, once you have accumulated that basket of skills and you continue to build on them, you market those skills online. Find things that you can sell online, so you are not bound by your geography or where you are living,” Chen stated. (RSM)