Ghana’s Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has opined that the Ghanaian youth or graduates do not have the required skillsets for the jobs available in the country.
According to the minister, there is a big gap between what students/graduates learn in school and what the industry requires from them.
He noted that the country’s educational institutions, especially the universities, must align their training with the industry needs in the face of rising unemployment among the youth.
“We have about 9 million people in a global economy that is driven by digitization, even though the jobs are in that direction we have less than a thousand graduates with IT-related skills every year from our tertiary universities. What has put the universities to sleep without realizing this major shift in where the world is going?” he observed.
Mr. Ofori-Atta reiterated that the situation where there are jobs available but graduates are unable to take up the jobs because they do not have the skills.
“85% of the unemployed youth have just left secondary school, what do we do with them, how do we give them vocational training to be able to become productive citizens? Over 50% of tertiary degree enrollment occurs in fields with limited or no future growth. How do we resolve that in the way we teach our graduates?” he said at the 73rd Annual New Year School & Conference at the University of Ghana.
“Employers are already feeling the pinch in the misalignment in our inadequacy of talent for their needs and therefore the drop in their looking for internships from our graduates. They report hard-to-fill positions despite high unemployment and we should be able to do something about that,” he added.
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Source: TheBBCghana.Com
