Story by Patience Nyagato
Findings from national skills audit consultations suggest the need for dialogue between tertiary institutions and industry for the nation to plug existing skills gaps.
As part of efforts to identify skills gaps and align training to achieve national development aspirations, government held consultations across the country on the skills landscape in Zimbabwe.
Chief among the findings is the mismatch between qualification standards and industrial needs.
The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Skills Audit and Development, Ambassador Rudo Chitiga impressed on the need for more engagement and coordination between institutions of higher learning and industry.
“The main finding is that we have many people doing skills development. It needs to be better coordinated. We need to create more platforms for dialogue between those who use the skills and those that train the skills, so industry and universities and technical colleges should talk much more so that they know what type of persons the industry is looking for.
“We need to get out of our training places workforce ready people rather than people who need to be retrained. We also looked at the importance and the need to review the attachment system as a skills development our instrument it is not at the moment fully fulfilling the skills development that we were looking for,” she said.
Ambassador Chitiga reiterated the need to align research being carried out at tertiary institutions with provincial resources.
“The report also highlighted the need for tertiary institutions to be informed by provincial endowments to be able to harness all national resources. The report also revealed the need for provincial endowments to inform innovations at universities and that our universities should dialogue much more with the provincial authorities in order to take advantage of the endowments in each of the province to make sure that the innovations that they come up with relate to the economic development plan of the province so that what we do is coordinated and synchronised across the different sectors.”
Government has put in place measures to address some of the gaps including introduction of work-related learning tertiary institutions.
