Last week, in what started off initially as a one-off feature, I argued how imperative it was to start pre-planning the development of our human resources, dealing not only with current industries but fledgling or even speculative ones as well.
I’ve had a week to consider the issue in greater depth, the result of my musing being that I now realize that there are several facets to this issue, most of which warrant more than a paragraph or two of fleeting analysis.
First of all, people tend to see most enterprises in isolation, even large ones. This could be the furthest thing from the truth.  For example, if we look at a medium size business like a restaurant, to cite a random example – we often only think of a restaurant in term of the final product or products it produces.  It is much more than that however, and like most businesses, the average restaurant functions by having established relationships with a number of corollary enterprises – Styrofoam wares suppliers; furniture craftsmen or retailers; various vendors for the ingredients they use to make their food; haberdashers; pest control services; security. The list can go on and on.
The same system applies for large-scale industries, but of course on a much grander scale. I don’t have any access to the data but I’m sure the mining industry, for example, has been the major customer – if it isn’t the logging industry – for tents and hammock suppliers here in Guyana, since workers in the interior need these items to sleep or rest during their downtimes.
The problems of adequate preparation come of course further up the pyramid of specialization, but I believe that one of the major things that stands in the way of revolutionizing our human resource capacity in the near future is our traditional way of thinking, a mentality that restricts the ambitions of our children into aiming for certain main channels, at the top of which stand the colonial era positions of respectability and economic status – the doctor or the lawyer.
The world has changed, but largely our outlook has not.  Let me give a good example.  Since my son has been growing up, I’ve spent a good deal of money on videogames. The US videogame industry, according to one report, contributed some US $4.9 billion to the US GDP between 2005-2008, outpacing the US economy in growth in the same period – 10.6 percent compared to America’s real growth of 2.8 percent.  Average salaries for the industry average about US $89,000, while some videogame developers are millionaires.  Yet how many local families would encourage their child to pursue videogames as a career?
And if that example is a bit extreme for you, let me come a bit closer to home. Both public and private healthcare services have developed exponentially in the past few years, particularly in the area of the medical technology available to Guyanese.  While there are no shortages of doctors, the amount of qualified radiologists – someone trained in analyzing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) – in the country is comparatively tiny. Yet a qualified radiologist can command a far higher salary than most professionals in Guyana.
What we need therefore – and again, I seem to come back to the first step in my solution for dealing with domestic violence a few articles ago –  is a fundamental shift in our imagination, in this case with regard to what is considered worthy work.
Now I’d be among the first to understand that the sustainability of any project has to do with the amount of financing available for expenditure on it. In my previous article, I suggested – with specific reference to the petroleum industry, a particular type of funding mechanism.  To quote myself,
“Hypothetically speaking, the sort of system I envisage would have embedded in its regulation and implementation regime, a policy that would stipulate that companies investing in petroleum exploration and extraction, once benefiting from whatever state concessions, would have to contribute a percentage of whatever investment into a mechanism – whether it be a new institution, or something built into the University of Guyana structure – geared specifically to equip locals with the skills required for functioning either within that specific industry or a related field.”
Of course, such a system has to be precluded by several legislative and other measures, and would be hence, realistically, only possible a couple years down the line. But right now, we can begin with low-cost initiatives, undertaken through public-private partnerships. I know that several entities – the University of Guyana being the most notable example – currently host job fairs or career days, focusing on jobs that are currently available.  However, nothing prevents the GMSA, for example, coming together with the Ministries of Culture, Youth and Sport, Labour, and Education, to host an annual youth expo themed along the lines of “Careers of the Future”, the obvious theme being on careers that are not currently available in Guyana but will soon be.
Or the Ministry of Labour, through its Employment Bureau, can easily come up with a basic public relations campaign – in conjunction with specific private sector entities – geared at getting parents and children to think outside the box when it comes to a career choice; imagine Banks DIH supporting a youth-attracting, parent-friendly flyer on the work undertaken by a biochemist.
Another viable programme I can conceive of that would necessitate some inter-Ministry cooperation would be a career tracking system, one that starts at the beginning of secondary education and is followed up all the way to the tertiary level. I know the temptation is to say that children have no real sense of what their future career might be at that level, but I beg to differ – what needs to be established basically is a system that captures the child’s inclinations and interests and matches them via a wide swathe in different career categories – for example, if the child shows a tendency towards taking toys apart and putting them together again, he or she can be placed into the category of engineering.  Throughout his or her secondary school career, periodic assessments would help to refine or reclassify that career choice. That is just one example, but there are several more than can be explored.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to do my own small part in contributing to this initiative, hypothetical as the premise is.  I will be looking up on some of the key industries that are set to launch off here, research some of the jobs available within those sectors, as well as try to project some of the potential corollary skills and services that will be needed to sustain these industries. (burrowesk@yahoo.com)