Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training, Kay McConney, expressed satisfaction with the collaboration between the entities involved in the launch of Cycle 2 of the Barbados Construction Gateway Training Initiative (BCGTI), which took place today in the auditorium of the Barbados Community College.
In her opening remarks, Ms. McConney lauded the collaboration of the Barbados Community College, the Barbados Vocational Training Board, the National Transformation Initiative (NTI), the Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology, and the Technical and Vocational Education and Training Council, on the initial establishment of the BCGTI.
“They came together in a partnership that was unprecedented at that scale, and what it did, it made them come together to share technology. It made them come together to share financially; it made them come together to pull their human resources to work together. It brought them together to create a unique certificate that had the stamp of all, rather than only the individual stamps of every university, of every institution.
“We started with communities, and that was part of seeking to integrate and transform the ways in which our tertiary institutions work together, and so I want to say that was part of transformative objective number one,” she stated.
Minister McConney said the launch of the programme is a ‘call to action’ to go out and get more people involved, noting: “If we do not adequately supply the construction industry in Barbados, we will have to continue to find others who can, and I happen to believe that Barbados has the capacity to expand our skills and our knowledge to be able to do well by our local construction industry.”
According to Ms. McConney, some of the participants in Cycle 1 did not complete the programme because of a number of challenges they faced, which included family, financial and literacy problems, and suggested, that some of the work in the programmes exceeded what they could handle. She stated that the Ministry did not see these instances as impediments, but as an opportunity to improve.
She also acknowledged that the effort of the National Transformation Initiative in the programme will apply to all who learn in different ways and expressed her satisfaction in a different approach being applied to teaching adults.
“I am happy to see that all programmes are now recognising and respecting that we have adult learners who learn differently, and that the way in which we deliver instruction must respect and align with those many different ways.”
The Education Minister explained that Cycle 2 will see an improvement in the quality, the context and the competencies of those coming out into the workplace.
She added that the BCGTI is part of the country’s policy to rescale and upskill people and said that additional training in Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence will be seen at the higher education and tertiary levels within the next year and a half, in an effort to help prepare people for the future of work and what the world will look like.
The BCGTI programme, which began as only a 12-week programme, will now run for 16 weeks in some cases, depending on the course of study.