NSS introduces new platform to incubate personnel for employment
A “flair” platform has been introduced by the National Service Scheme as part of measures to help National Service Personnel gain employable skills or start their enterprises to minimize the unemployment rate.
The said platform is an employability one, which also allows user agencies to request graduates with specific skills or training to undertake national service at their end.
Also, the portal offers stakeholders the opportunity to benefit from skill matching information, which includes a course of study or profession and serves as a database that provides information on both National Service Personnel and user agencies.
Mr Osei Assibey Antwi, Executive Director of the NSS revealed this at a user agency stakeholder meeting at the Cedi Conference Hall, University of Ghana, Accra.
The conference attracted representatives of over 1,000 private companies and enterprises that use national service personnel, which was on the theme, “Partnership for Efficient Service Delivery”.
Similar workshops have been organised for all tertiary educational institutions across the country on the new vision and the platform.
Mr Osei Assibey described the user agencies as formidable partners of the national service scheme in attaining the vision of “Deployment for Employment.”
The National Service Scheme recently unveiled its new vision of “Deployment for Employment”, away from the previous mandate of just deploying personnel. It has also discussed its new vision with the Ghana Employers Association and the Association of Ghana Industries.
Mr Osei Assibey revealed the NSS decision to work assiduously with user agencies and other partners to ensure that the one year for the national service was used judiciously to provide top-up training for the graduates.
This, he explained, was to ensure that service personnel who undertake their service at other organisations gained skills that would make them employable while the NSS also through its numerous modules was offering skills to many others.
“The shift in paradigm from purely deploying personnel for a year to an agency that offers permanent employment opportunities, as well as provides entrepreneurial and employment skills for the youth has become necessary due to the increasing unemployment rate,” Mr Osei Assibey Antwi, has announced.
He said the new move was aimed at repositioning the scheme to retain some of its personnel after their national service and also to ensure that those who went out to the world of work were capable and ready to create their own companies, employ others and or fit and ready to be employed.
Modules
Mr Osei Assibey mentioned some of the modules designed by the NSS to incubate national service personnel into global entrepreneurs including the ‘NSS-Ghana Tourism Authority Support programme, construction (housing) of real estate and public facilities, agriculture and the NSS-Techlab partnership to design computer application system.
He said henceforth, the over 30,000 national service personnel who would be posted to teach at all educational levels, would be given at least a month’s training and was of the strong conviction that by the time they entered the classroom, they would have a provisional teaching license.
“There is a law in this country which frowns on teaching without pedagogic training, we have linked up with National Teaching Council (NTC) which is developing the curriculum that would be used for the short training,” he explained.
Aside from the training, he said, the NSS was partnering with T-Tel for funding to support the NTC to organise the training, adding that the NSS was arranging for funding to provide a 14-month online training that would give the personnel a professional diploma certificate in teaching.
In a speech read on his behalf, a Deputy Minister of Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, said for the private sector, turnaround time was important and also abhor bureaucracies that dissipate time and resources, “so for the National Service Secretariat to introduce such a portal is commendable”.
He added that the NSS has moved a step ahead as an effective public sector agency to provide the private sector with the required support so that they would be in better stead to ensure a stronger collaboration that would address their needs and that of the teeming Ghanaian youth.
