Although companies in the Mena region are showing strong commitment to long-term training and professional development of employees, more needs to be done, an expert in professional education has said.
“Businesses should take a wider responsibility for supporting skills-related issues within their industry. They should be encouraged and provided with incentives to invest in education and professional development - not just their company but the sector as a whole on a global scale,” said Mark Andrews, Mena Regional Director, Edexcel, the UK-based awarding body and part of Pearson, the world’s largest education services providers.
He said: “Managers should become better educators of their own staff. Mentoring is an extremely effective mechanism for employees to develop functional understanding and business socialisation. Engaging managers and leaders in the ongoing education of their own staff is a high-impact, low-cost approach that can be easily adopted in an organisation of any size.”
“The chances of building a job-ready workforce will increase significantly if we can embed this learning into primary and secondary education, with fine-tuning during higher or further education,” Andrews said.
“Apprenticeships and internships should be revived and incentivised as they represent a highly successful model for involving business and industry in education, and results are almost universally positive.
“It is obvious there is a significant disconnect between education systems and the needs of 21st century employers, both public and private. The match between what employers, individuals and governments seek and what the education and training systems provide appears ill-fitting in many countries,” he said.