Fazal Karim

For­mer min­is­ter of ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing and for­mer MP for Ch­agua­nas East

In four years, we will com­plete the first 25 years of the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Tax­pay­ers have in­vest­ed more than $8 bil­lion (TT) on the GATE pro­gramme since 2004. The pro­gramme achieved its high­est lev­els of par­tic­i­pa­tion dur­ing the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship tenure with over 60,000 stu­dents per an­num pur­su­ing uni­ver­si­ty, col­lege and tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing.

The GATE pro­gramme has been cut from over $650 mil­lion (TT) un­der the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment to $400 mil­lion (TT) un­der the PNM Gov­ern­ment.

The Gov­ern­ment’s GATE pol­i­cy has ex­iled life­long learn­ers above 50 years, tar­get­ed the mid­dle class through a flawed means test, re­strict­ed re­gion­al stud­ies, cur­tailed un­der­grad­u­ate stud­ies and dis­con­tin­ued post­grad­u­ate stud­ies.

The net ef­fect of these aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures has been a com­plete loss of con­fi­dence in the ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing sys­tem. Ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion par­tic­i­pa­tion has tak­en a nose­dive to be­low 30,000 stu­dents be­fore the on­set of the pan­dem­ic, but the big­ger cri­sis is the ab­sence of pur­pose­ful lead­er­ship and vi­sion for the sec­tor.

COVID-19 has al­so ac­cel­er­at­ed the three in­ter­twined As– au­toma­tion, al­go­rithms, and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI). Ama­zon dou­bled its year over year-net prof­it from US$2.6 bil­lion to US$5.2 bil­lion even in the midst of a pan­dem­ic point­ing to an in­creas­ing re­liance on ma­chines over man­u­al sys­tems.

The jobs pan­dem­ic which I have de­fined as “The mas­sive loss of jobs across in­ter­na­tion­al bound­aries caused by a health pan­dem­ic” has re­sult­ed in the loss of mil­lions of jobs due to full or par­tial busi­ness clo­sures.

The ILO es­ti­mates 34 mil­lion job loss­es in the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean re­gion alone as a re­sult of the pan­dem­ic. The World Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum al­so projects that 85 mil­lion jobs could be lost to the three As over the next five years, but that 97 mil­lion new roles could emerge to meet the chang­ing work­force de­mands. The fu­ture grad­u­ate must pre­pare for the jobs of to­mor­row by mak­ing a ca­reer piv­ot to­day. A wave of new jobs is ex­pect­ed to emerge over the next five to ten years, all of which are linked to in­creased tech­nol­o­gy dif­fu­sion, the da­ta and AI econ­o­my, the green econ­o­my, and the new roles in en­gi­neer­ing.

Emerg­ing jobs with mass-scale op­por­tu­ni­ties in­clude Cloud En­gi­neers, De­vOps En­gi­neers, AI Spe­cial­ists, Full Stack En­gi­neers, Javascript De­vel­op­ers, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Spe­cial­ists, Tal­ent Ac­qui­si­tion Spe­cial­ists, Qual­i­ty As­sur­ance En­gi­neers, and Cus­tomer Suc­cess Spe­cial­ists among oth­ers.

How then does T&T leap in­to the fu­ture to pro­vide sus­tain­able job op­por­tu­ni­ties for our grad­u­ates? The an­swer be­gins with a par­a­digm shift in cur­rent think­ing. Ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing must not be viewed as an ex­pense but in­stead as an in­vest­ment.

Face­book has a mar­ket cap and net worth of over US$500 bil­lion. Our US$1.2 bil­lion in­vest­ment on the GATE pro­gramme over the years could de­rive ex­po­nen­tial ROI if our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem nur­tures one grad­u­ate of Zucker­berg’s ilk.

Per­for­mance-based fund­ing mech­a­nisms for both stu­dents and in­sti­tu­tions must be lever­aged to in­cen­tivise tal­ent de­vel­op­ment in emerg­ing ca­reers as well as to nur­ture key cross-cut­ting skills such as crit­i­cal think­ing, prob­lem-solv­ing, ac­tive learn­ing, self-man­age­ment, and re­silience.

Nine months have elapsed since the Gov­ern­ment man­dat­ed busi­ness clo­sures which re­sult­ed in over 40,000 na­tion­als los­ing their jobs ei­ther on a tem­po­rary or per­ma­nent ba­sis. An ur­gent, mass and ac­ces­si­ble reskilling and up­skilling pro­gramme twinned with so­cial as­sis­tance pro­grammes such as the Salary Re­lief Grant should be pri­ori­tised. The planned YTEPP-Cours­era project com­menc­ing in Jan­u­ary 2021, though wel­comed, will ben­e­fit a few hun­dred peo­ple and will have min­i­mal im­pact on the scale of the fall­out in the labour mar­ket num­ber­ing in the tens of thou­sands.

All learn­ing in­sti­tu­tions must there­fore be equipped to man­age a hy­brid mod­el of phys­i­cal and vir­tu­al learn­ing as a strat­e­gy to re­duce stu­dent den­si­ties on cam­pus­es in a post-pan­dem­ic era. The Na­tion­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore, for in­stance, has lim­it­ed the num­ber of stu­dents on-cam­pus to no more than three-fifths of its to­tal ca­pac­i­ty.

In­vest­ments in the fu­ture grad­u­ate must start to­day to re­alise div­i­dends to­mor­row in the form of in­no­v­a­tive think­ing and the growth and de­vel­op­ment of new work­ers and in­dus­tries.

Fail­ure to fund ed­u­ca­tion pro­grammes de­signed to up­skill and reskill the work­force will trans­late in­to sec­ond and third waves of the jobs pan­dem­ic, and con­se­quent ca­su­al­ties of the ed­u­ca­tion of the na­tion's stu­dents at all lev­els.

The year 2021 brings new pos­si­bil­i­ties for our coun­try. Hap­py New Year!