Jobs and Lifelong Learning

Last night was our final meeting of the current 3 year term for this standing committee.

It has been a term of many changes. We were initially focused on promoting lifelong learning amongst our people and promoting upgrading and skills in certain sectors that had a demand for employees. That has been the focus of this committee since 2016 when this whole skillsfuture movement took off. And we had a fairly small team with a smallish budget conducting these workshops.

Then this whole new area of finding nearby jobs for people came about last year. This has been timely because of the advent of AI taking away entry level jobs and a slowing economy. This whole new area was also then parked under our committee,

That has entailed a large increase in headcount, a much bigger budget and more papers for each meeting since the two teams are doing quite different things.

This was the first meeting where both teams presented their papers and their work progress and inevitably there were many teething issues with the way the reports are set out and presented. Hopefully they are now ironed out and the work progresses.

Quite apart from ensuring that we do something meaningful for our people that will make a lasting impact in their lives as opposed to simply hitting a kpi that has been set out for them, I do hope the two teams finds ways to cooperate and synergise and provide meaningful service. There must be ways in which lifelong learning workshops can be tailored based on the demand for jobs and the likewise people who are looking for jobs at the same time can attend the workshops can be attended to by the jobs team.