‘The NBTE might come up with frameworks but it cannot provide training’ – Guilfoyle

Nigerian artisans have been criticised for dearth of requisite trade skills and some Nigerians have resorted to the import of these skills from neighbouring countries.  In this interview, CONNIE GUILFOYLE, Director at Etiwa Vocational Training Limited narrates the odyssey that led to the foundation of a leading vocational centre in Lagos. He spoke to STEPHEN ONYEKWELU. Excerpts:

Please tell us who you are why you are in Nigeria?

I have been in Nigeria for the past 15 years. I run a contracting company, in building and construction essentially: plumbing, air-conditioning, plastering and all the activities that make a building functional but not the actual construction.

When the company started to gain grounds and grow, coupled with the fact that a lot of foreign direct investments were coming into Nigeria. These international players wanted buildings that met the same international standards as where in the world. This cannot happen overnight.

The problem arises trying to deliver that quality within Nigeria given the level of trade skills. There is no shortage of people available in the market but the training they have received we find does not meet international standards and largely undocumented and a lot of what you will call bad habits and they also lacked basic understanding of the fundamentals.

How did you respond to this situation?

Of course the answer to that is to bring in specialists from overseas, to deliver this. It is initially all well and good but soon becomes expensive and makes it very hard to compete in the market. It is an extremely delicate balance; to bring in specialists to do the job and remain competitive. The common denominator then is if you want to be competitive, you have to train your staff, in order to up-skill them to meet acceptable global standards. You will need specialists in some areas, for quite some time to come but on the whole we need to lift our guys up and be less reliant on international expertise in order to keep up with the pressure of competition. This also will enable developers to get the level of standard they require and make some fair return on their investment.

We set out to outsource some these jobs. We wanted to look at what is available and simply outsource the training of artisans to some trainers in government owned vocational schools. The simple reason is because training is not our core business, we are into construction. We could not find any training centre. Then we tried doing some in-house experts to set some training during the weekends, this had its drawbacks too. We constantly ran out of time and the only option was to train our people overseas. This option, we quickly realised would work only to train one or two people not for large numbers of people. We also knew we needed to rollout long-term training for all staff, if we wanted to benefit from economies of scale.

A year past, two years and we were still tinkering with various options, at the end of two years searching for trainers, we eventually found a company overseas that specialises in training. This is how it worked. Let us say we wanted to develop a course or curriculum for electrical, we will tell the training company, in this case based in Ireland, the fly the specialist in, he stays here for a number of weeks, he will examine our needs, set some aptitude questions then goes away to develop a curriculum that meets our special needs, benchmarking it against international standards.

What level of school is the minimum requirement to successfully follow this training?

The training requires some level of schooling, such as solid basic education. This is because as you go through the training there are stages that would require basic understanding of mathematical operators and operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).

What we do is we train everyone as far as their arithmetic skills carry them. For those who have challenges, we keep them and look for ways of helping them learn. They do not need calculus but as trades’ people they did need some basic understanding of mathematics.

For the most part, we were able to retain a majority of them. We surely could not go back to teach those basic stuffs they were supposed to have learnt early on, this is fundamental education.

Going forward, we will take our candidates from existing vocational schools; we have few in Lagos state. These tend to be teenagers between the ages of 17 and 18 and they have a very good level of basic education. For instance the technical school at Ikorodu, teaches some basic levels of Mathematics, English, Science and may be Mechanical or Electrical Engineering.

What are some of your future plans?

The need for training is not going to go away. At some point we turned to private vocational schools to meet our needs for basic education but quickly realised this was not going to be sustainable.

We did not set out initially to set up training schools but to fulfill our needs as a business in the construction industry. Four years afterwards, we find ourselves in the training business and it has been a learning process. It has been a school for me as well. There are number of people who have graduated.

Our business is better for it, because our people are better. Now, we have the skills but the next level leadership. We need people to step up and take more responsibilities, for instance, being a foreman is a position of leadership and goes beyond skills acquisition. We are looking for team leaders, someone who can take responsibilities. When we identify them, we develop courses for them. May be of 36 students we choose six. These candidates get training in leadership, responsibility and soft skills. They assure quality, discipline and adherence to professional ethics.

When these leaders, the foremen and supervisors get it right we will be on the right path to sustainability and their salaries go up because they are of immense value to us. For instance, we recently sent a team of our artisans to Ghana and the level of responsibility they displayed was amazing. It will take a long time to get all right but there are already signs we are getting it right.

What role should the government play?

This type of human capital development is normally funded by government. There are private interests but that is not enough.

It is the job of local governments to legislate. For instance, if the government says you cannot handle cooling systems unless you have a license to do so, this would have enormous impact. But here it is not legislated, there is no regulation and people take the path of least resistance.

The way forward is for government at every level to legislate, this would enable vocational centres such as Etiwa to develop courses to meet the specifications of the legislation. When this happens, the private companies and individuals would scramble to get those certifications. It could happen, but it will take a bit of time and effort from government at all levels. However, to legislate training, the facilities must be there and access should be affordable. There has to be a system that makes them affordable to people.

How about standardisation?

There is some progress in that direction. The National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) is working on National Occupational Standards within the framework of the National Vocational Qualification Framework (NVQF) and this is a step in the right direction. Legislation should come after the NVQF is put in place and facilities set up to provide requisite training.

The NBTE might come up with the frameworks but it cannot provide the training. This is where the Private-Public-Partnerships come. This has been on the table for several years with little progress. There are no PPPs in this space currently. It cost a lot of money to setup such training centres.

What are the numbers like, of students and tuition?

We graduate about 400 to 500 students each year. We also have an apprenticeship programme which lasts for two years; a long-term programme. For the apprenticeship programme, we generally take those coming from vocational schools in Lagos or across the country; they are young, energetic and have not learnt bad work habits. We are trying to increase the number of females but not overnight, we had two female graduates in last month (February), which is good in an industry where you do not see many females. You rarely would find any female electrician on site in Nigeria but you do now.

The apprenticeship programme is quite expensive, so we try to get a buy-in from private companies or local governments for sponsorships. We are working on a credit facility to enable trainees borrow a percentage of the money they will need. A fund or a sponsor will supply the other percentage; we have not worked what these percentages will mean in reality, 50:50 or something else. We know in a couple of weeks after our discussion with Lapo Microfinance Bank. A percentage of their salary after they have graduated will go towards paying their loans.

There is no shortage of potential students; there is the problem of funding. Students cannot afford. The reason why we want the buy-in of private companies to partly sponsor some students is because when this happens, they keep an eye on the progress of the student.

What is the meaning of Etiwa?

Without the E it means Training Institute West Africa (tiwa). The E means different things to different people; it could mean Eko.

Now the training company we have partnered with, which develops our courses is Irish, I am Irish, and we get a lot of support from the Irish Trade Missions and Minister who were right here when we opened officially. Ireland is also known as the Emerald Island, hence the E.

STEPHEN ONYEKWELU