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Monday, February 24, 2025

85 EPoS residents start Up Skill Me programme

by

Carisa Lee
160 days ago
20240917
John Battersby gives his testimony at the Up Skill Me orientation at Woodford Lodge, Chaguanas, yesterday. Looking on from left, are EPoS chairman Hillan Morean, dean of NESC-IT Kofi Toney and Business Development officer  NESC-IT Terry Schultz.

John Battersby gives his testimony at the Up Skill Me orientation at Woodford Lodge, Chaguanas, yesterday. Looking on from left, are EPoS chairman Hillan Morean, dean of NESC-IT Kofi Toney and Business Development officer NESC-IT Terry Schultz.

VASHTI SINGH

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.


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