Govt to undertake skills audit

Nqobile Tshili, Chronicle Correspondent
THE Government is in the process of conducting a national skills audit and the framework of the study is expected to be in place by January next year, a Cabinet Minister has said.

The Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development, Professor Jonathan Moyo, told journalists at the Bulawayo Press Club on Friday that his office has started engaging industry and institutions of higher learning to formulate a framework for the skills audit.

He said the skills audit would address shortcomings that have seen students studying for degrees that are not relevant to industry.

The Minister said university graduates should be inventors not job seekers.

“We in the Ministry Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development are currently engaging the institutions of higher and tertiary education and industry so that we link the programmes that the universities are doing with the skills requirements of the country. We haven’t had a skills audit since 1982 and we need to do this,” he said.

“People have been getting irrelevant degrees, the issue of what degree to pursue needs to be re-examined now so that there is a functional relationship between what people are studying and what the national economy needs as well as what the regional economy needs in the case of Sadc and Comesa.”

Prof Moyo rubbished claims that the country’s universities’ enrolments were too high saying such pronouncements were being made by alarmists without insight.

— @nqotshili