Yvonne Webb

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar is ex­pect­ed to open the $28 mil­lion Met­al In­dus­tries Com­pa­ny (MIC) In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy in her con­stituen­cy on May 21, three days be­fore her ad­min­is­tra­tion marks its fourth year in of­fice.Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing Min­is­ter Fazal Karim gave the open­ing date dur­ing a vis­it to the al­most com­plet­ed in­sti­tute over the week­end.

He said the MIC cen­tre in Diego Mar­tin Cen­tre al­so was sched­uled to be opened next month. Karim was ac­com­pa­nied by chair­man of MIC David Lee and, Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Cen­tre (NESC) chair­man Feeroz Khan on the Pe­nal vis­it.There are al­so two sec­ondary schools lo­cat­ed op­po­site the cen­tre.

Khan said some of the cours­es be­ing of­fered are so­lar and pho­to­volta­ic en­er­gy, elec­tri­cal in­stal­la­tion, food prepa­ra­tion and culi­nary arts, di­etet­ics, as well as some tra­di­tion­al pro­grammes, such as car­pen­try, plumb­ing, ma­son­ry, which will all be taught over a two-year pe­ri­od.Short­er cours­es, in­clud­ing com­put­er lit­er­a­cy, and some sup­port­ing cours­es, such as en­tre­pre­neur­ship and lifeskills, al­so are be­ing of­fered.

All of these cours­es are sched­uled to start from Sep­tem­ber, Khan said.Karim said the fa­cil­i­ty, which was with­in sched­ule for com­ple­tion and had in­curred no cost over­runs, would dou­ble as an in­sti­tute of tech­nol­o­gy as well as a Work­force As­sess­ment Cen­tre (WAC). He said it will cater to the needs of the lo­cal labour mar­ket as it moves from be­ing low-skill/low-wage to high-skill/high-wage."The WAC will aid work­ers who have com­pe­ten­cies but are not yet cer­ti­fied and will of­fer train­ing from lev­els one to four," he added.

He said full-time and part-time class­es would al­so be­gin next month with a pro­ject­ed in­take of be­tween 200-300 stu­dents in or­der to max­imise the use of the fa­cil­i­ty.The land on which the cen­tre is con­struct­ed was do­nat­ed by State-owned oil and gas com­pa­ny Petrotrin and to that end, Karim said, pri­or­i­ty would be giv­en to Petrotrin work­ers and their chil­dren to ac­cess the pro­grammes.