Graduates with technical and vocational
background, have the opportunity to work in the security services, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Cephas Arthur said in Accra on Thursday.
He said the security services did not only employ Senior High School graduates, and within the Ghana Police Service (GPS) were departments that required technical and vocational workers like plumbers, draftsmen, auto-mechanics, electricians, caterers and quantity surveyors and urged parents to encourage their children interested in such jobs to pursue them.
DSP Arthur of the Police Public Relations Department of Service was speaking at the launch of a book titled: �Career Guidance and Job
Opportunities for All,� published by Silvaline Press, a publishing house.
The book, which focuses on the importance of technical and vocational education as a tool to solving the unemployment problems in Ghana was
published in collaboration with the security services and supported by the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare.
DSP Arthur said technical and vocational education was still relevant in Ghana and called on Ghanaians to change their negative attitude towards technical and vocational workers.
Mr Antwi-Boasiako Sekyere, Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Welfare, who launched the book, advised parents not to push their children to pursue specific careers that the children themselves did not have any interest.
�Let your children explore and identify their own interest and do not discourage them if they have interest in vocational or technical skills,� he added.
He said technical and vocational education trained people to acquire skills which could enable them to set up their own business and pointed out that the key to unemployment problems in the country did not depend on formal sector employment.
�Only 15 per cent of the country�s workforce is employed by the formal sector therefore, if you are waiting to be employed in the formal sector your chance is very small,� he noted.
Mr Sekyere reiterated the call for people to change their attitude towards workers in the informal sector and said the country needed to pay
attention to technical and vocational education.
Mr Stephen Amponsah, Director of National Vocational Training Institute (NVTI) said education in Ghana had almost become synonymous with the grammar-type of education, however, many jobs in the workplace required skills and experience, which could only be gained through vocational training.
�If we had considered vocational training as a very good alternative to grammar-type education, the anxieties of parents trying to seek admission for their children in the Senior High Schools would not have arisen,� he said.