World Vision, Microsoft prepare tertiary students for the job market

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Youth Sparks Project rolls out a one day booth camp
Wednesday, November 9, 2016

WORLD Vision International in partnership with Microsoft has rolled out a project for final year students of the Methodist University College in Accra to be taught how to be relevant on the Ghanaian job market.

The forum forms part of a project dubbed the ‘Youth Spark’ is already being rolled out in some parts of the country to implore the youth to engage in employable skills.

The project, being implemented by World Vision International with Microsoft Services as the funding agency, has the intension to equip several unskilled and learned youth with employable and entrepreneurial skills.

Taking the final year students of the Methodist University College through the rudiments of writing an enticing Curriculum Vitae (CV), Jemima Brown Asare, a Recruitment Specialist at World Vision, said students, after school, need to be prepare themselves for the job market.

She encouraged the students to start writing their CVs and have some of their lecturers supervise it before they venture onto the job market. 

She said life is continuous but, with skills, it brings outcomes that lead to development of the human being.

She reminded them to be mindful of what they include in their CVs as job seekers after school as some of these mistakes can spell doom for them.

She urged the students to take up volunteer jobs while on campus to enable them to include that in their CVs as working experience.

“It is not easy to build oneself in the corporate world without doing things the right way and students seeking jobs must avoid all manner of information which are not needed on their CVs,” she explained.

She urged the students to take time off to learn about the institutions they intend to work with as part of the means to keep them abreast with what the company does.

Mr Franklin Cudjoe, the President of Imani Ghana, a policy think tank, minced no words when he said tertiary students, in recent times, are not up to speed with the job market hence the need to prepare them for the job market.

He took the opportunity to commend World Vision and Microsoft for the initiatives they have taken to offer skills and entrepreneurial training to the youth.    

In an interview with the Project Coordinator for World Vision, Christian Enadzi, he said the project is geared towards offering the youth employable skills and entrepreneurial training.

He said the main core of the project was to ensure that the youth are given the necessary skills that can make them employable and easily identified by their employers.

He quickly added that the project, since its inception, has engaged unskilled youth in the Ga East District - precisely Amasaman area of the Greater-Accra Region - Mpohor-Wassa districts in the Western Region as well as focusing on the students who are career-oriented with little or no skills in job seeking.

The forum on the Methodist University College was the maiden skills training programme organised for the tertiary students in the country by World Vision and it is expected to be replicated in other universities across the country.