Chief Adminstrative Secretary Zack Kinuthia has urged youth in the country to embrace courses offered at Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) institutions in order to acquire skills needed for the country to achieve Vision 2030.
Speaking in Mabera Technical Training Institute in Migori county during inspections, Kinuthia said technical training was key to accomplishing the country’s development agenda adding that time has come for to embrace the role of tertiary and technical training in national development.
He told youth to shift from the populist view of white collar jobs which are highly pegged on university degree qualifications and focus more on skills-oriented approaches that equip them with practical skills that match their aspirations and help the country became a middle-income industrialised nation.
According to Kinuthia, undue pressure on non-technical courses has weighed down universities over the years yet huge investments made in TVET institutions remained underutilised insisting that the situation needed to be addressed in order to ensure the nation get requisite skills in order to achieve a middle-income status by the year 2030.
He further pointed at the availability of loans disbursed by the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) to students enrolled to technical institutions as evidence of the opportunities that lie untapped.
His calls for focus on technical training programmes come barely a month after similar calls late last year when he challenged universities to align their programmes to the country’s Vision 2030.
By Basil Okoth
