PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

En­gi­neers will be in high de­mand for sev­er­al im­por­tant gov­ern­ment projects, Min­is­ter of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing Prakash Per­sad has said.

Speak­ing at the As­so­ci­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al En­gi­neers of Trinidad & To­ba­go’s (APETT) Tech­ni­cal Con­fer­ence 2026 en­ti­tled ‘ En­gi­neer­ing Our Fu­ture: Sus­tain­able, Smart, Re­silient’, Per­sad not­ed that the gov­ern­ment’s re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion project, as well as the on­go­ing en­er­gy tran­si­tion plans in the coun­try would re­quire the skills of en­gi­neers.

“En­gi­neer­ing is about mak­ing the lives of peo­ple bet­ter, we should nev­er lose sight of that, and that should be em­bed­ded in ed­u­ca­tion as you go for­ward. So when we speak about en­gi­neer­ing of the fu­ture, we are not just talk­ing about roads and bridges or build­ings. We are talk­ing about de­sign sys­tems that sup­port eco­nom­ic growth, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty and so­cial in­clu­sion,” said Per­sad, dur­ing the event at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.

“Now you will all know that the gov­ern­ment is em­bark­ing on the pro­gramme of na­tion­al re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion of the in­fra­struc­ture of the coun­try. And there­fore there’ll be a great de­mand for en­gi­neers.”

He said, “Trinidad and To­ba­go is at a piv­otal mo­ment. We are nav­i­gat­ing an en­er­gy tran­si­tion from oil and gas to hy­dro­gen to so­lar en­er­gy to wind en­er­gy.”

How­ev­er, while he not­ed there had been moves made with re­gard to de­vel­op­ing so­lar farms in the coun­try, he lament­ed there were lim­it­ed laws to op­ti­mise such sys­tems to the na­tion’s ben­e­fit.

“There is no leg­is­la­tion to al­low for pow­er from the grid, from so­lar pan­els, to go to the grid. I’ve been hear­ing of that since I was in the 80s,” he said, stress­ing that there was too much dis­con­nect in the ap­proach from an ed­u­ca­tion stand­point.

“A crit­i­cal part of en­gi­neer­ing. The fu­ture lies in how we pre­pare our peo­ple. For too long, tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al train­ing and the tra­di­tion­al ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion have been treat­ed as sep­a­rate path­ways, but the re­al­i­ty is, they must be in­ter­con­nect­ed,” he said.

APETT pres­i­dent Ian Cox agreed that there was a dis­con­nect in terms of un­der­stand­ing roles across sec­tors.

“So we have gen­er­al prob­lems in terms of ac­knowl­edg­ing where the pro­fes­sion­al fits in­to the space and then hav­ing that ex­change of in­for­ma­tion. But we know that the dis­cus­sions do hap­pen, and we are here and able, and from what I have heard, that en­gage­ment is ad­vanc­ing and is al­low­ing us to con­tribute mean­ing­ful­ly and move all these dif­fer­ent ini­tia­tives in the cor­rect di­rec­tion,” he said, as he stressed en­gi­neers were ea­ger to help im­prove the coun­try and would sup­port any move to bridge the gaps as re­quired.