Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

A co­hort of 85 East Port-of-Spain res­i­dents trav­elled to Wood­ford Lodge, Ch­agua­nas, ear­ly yes­ter­day for the ori­en­ta­tion of the Up Skill Me pro­gramme.

Both the East Port-of-Spain De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (EPOS) and the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Cen­tre (NESC) Tech­ni­cal In­sti­tute col­lab­o­rat­ed on the cre­ation of the pro­gramme, which of­fers five hands-on cours­es.

Those cours­es in­clude au­to­mo­tive ser­vices, au­to­mo­tive elec­tri­cal & HVAC main­te­nance, heavy equip­ment op­er­a­tion, au­dio record­ing for video pro­duc­tion, and air con­di­tion­ing and re­frig­er­a­tion main­te­nance.

The con­tact hours range from 60 to 280 de­pend­ing on the course.

EPOS chair­man Hillan More­an told the 85 res­i­dents that the board was hope­ful that they would com­plete the cours­es and warned them about ful­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in the ac­tiv­i­ty.

“There are per­sons out­side of this room right now who would have not made it in­to this room to­day and sad­ly, what we have recog­nised with some pro­grammes is that peo­ple will start very strong­ly and for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, they will fall off, some of them will fall off for the slack­est of rea­sons,” More­an said.

More­an, who was the deputy may­or of Port-of-Spain from 2016 to 2023, said he was not chas­ing the co­hort away but rather let­ting them know how se­ri­ous­ly EPOS and NESC were tak­ing their learn­ing.

“We don’t just see this as an ac­com­plish­ment for the com­pa­ny, this isn’t some­thing that we go­ing to boast to the min­istry about to say we trained 85 peo­ple. We want to say that we de­vel­oped 85 change mak­ers in the com­mu­ni­ties in East Port-of-Spain,” he said.

The EPOS chair­man told the co­hort they were there to sup­port them.

A 2022 grad­u­ate of the Up Skill Me pro­gramme, John Bat­ters­by, said he could at­test to the se­ri­ous­ness of the ac­tiv­i­ty. He praised his in­struc­tors for their per­sis­tence and pa­tience.

“You see that man in the back they, Mr Rose, the in­struc­tor, he rough around the edges eh, but he’s a boss, he’s a gen­er­al I tell you that. He take the time with we and he show we the thing boy,” Bat­ters­by said.

Bat­ters­by told the co­hort sit­ting where he once was, that when he start­ed he was “re­al shaky” but he said he and his 19 oth­er par­tic­i­pants ap­plied them­selves and were suc­cess­ful in the end.

He was vale­dic­to­ri­an of the 2022 co­hort and al­so won best op­er­a­tor.

“What I show­ing you is, I come out from where I come from, all of we come from dif­fer­ent parts of the ghet­to, but this is an op­por­tu­ni­ty for we to re­al­ly ap­ply we self and in­vest we self,” he said.

He told his 85 neigh­bours that the course could do a lot for their fu­ture.