‘Come off the streets’

SCIENCE, Technology and Tertiary Education Minister Colm Imbert yesterday urged all of the nation’s unemployed youths to “come off the streets” and learn a lifelong skill in the Government’s Multi-Sector Skills Training Programme (MUST). Speaking at the post-Cabinet news conference at Whitehall, Imbert said Cabinet agreed that trainees in the first phase of MUST will be paid a daily stipend of $60 and $125 million has been allocated to the programme  for the next fiscal year.

Recalling that the objective of MUST was to increase the skills levels of some 20,000 unemployed citizens, MUST begins in June and will focus initially on the construction sector, Imbert said: “During May, the Ministry will be holding consultations with employers because one of the features of MUST is that we are placing the trainees into real life, workplace situations. “We will be holding discussions in the first place with contractors, determining their needs in terms of tradesmen because this is a programme designed to produce tradesmen and we will be placing the trainees on to actual construction projects all over the country. The level of training will be determined by the level of skill, qualification and experience of the entrants.”

The Minister explained that based on these criteria, the entrants will be placed in level one, two or three training programmes. “Our focus initially is on level one because we believe that our target group is the large group of unemployed young persons who may have little formal education and not much experience,” Imbert added. Among the trades on which focus is being placed are plumbing, welding, masonry, carpentry and electrical engineering.

The Minister said the stipend of $60 per day was arrived at after Cabinet “looked at wages across the board” in several other training programmes in Trinidad and Tobago today. “We expect that this will be an incentive to persons to come off the streets and come into this training programme so that at the end of it, they will get some certifiable skill and thus become valuable members of the society. “We are moving swiftly to put all the steps in place to make this a very meaningful programme and part of the government’s thrust in upgrading the skills level of our nation’s young citizens in particular,” Imbert declared.