The Ministry of Labour this past Saturday launched its eighth installment of their “Labour on the Blocks” initiative processing some 450 jobseekers.
Some 20 businesses were in attendance on the grounds of the C.V. Bethel Senior High School in search of qualified individuals to take their business to the next level.
Labour Minister Dion Foulkes announced that a few businesses were making their debut that day.
He said, “for the first time we have the marine industry represented and we have both Aquamarine and Campbell’s Shipping here today. I’m very pleased that they have come out because, as you know, the Prime Minister has directed that the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Education focus on the Marine Sciences and other marine opportunities.”
Minister Foulkes said he and his ministry spoke with all the businesses present at the event and discovered that some plan to hire as much as 40 candidates.
He said, “I’d like to thank the business community for participating. The Ministry of Labour feels very upbeat about the economy. We know that this is the best tourism year we’ve had in a very long time. Tourism is up 15 per cent nationally, and that is going straight down to the average man in his community.”
He added, “so there are jobs out there. We’d like to encourage Bahamians to seek jobs and to be prepared. Training is a vital thing that we’re doing.”
The government is also helping jobseekers that aren’t quite ready to enter the job market.
The Journal spoke with Tonika Stubbs of the Citizen Job Core, which plans to fill the skill gap that exists in the country.
She said, “it is an IDB funded program that works along with the Ministry of National Security Now, a part of our project, we also have four components, and in total we have about 7 or 8 ministries that we do work with.”
She added, “for our second component we’re actually tackling youth employability. We created the Citizen Job Core which is where we’ll collaborate with the NTA to provide soft skills training, literacy, and numeracy training.”
Stubbs said they are expecting to host a 12-week program as early as next month.
The first four weeks will be dedicated to soft skills, literacy, and numeracy while the remaining 8 weeks will be on the job training.
Participants will be offered a small stipend with the 8-week portion and they are currently looking for individuals that have no high school diploma, no BGCSE’s, and are in desperate need of work.
The program officially kicks off on October 9th.
