With so many different groups working under the Employees Retraining Board, it should have had all the backup necessary to make the schemes unqualified successes. But as so often happens in enterprises of this kind, it simply results in a tangle of red tape. The only real achievement is a marathon of bureaucratic bungling. Worse still, in some cases, there has been a deliberate distortion of the facts.
An Ombudsman's report into the work of the board reveals failures at every level. The schemes appear to have been inadequately assessed, badly monitored and poorly evaluated. So much so that when 10 out of 17 retrainees abandoned a soya-bean product course after the first day, all 17 were counted as successful placements. And when 11 trainees left a shoe-making course, they were still included in the figures along with the seven who stayed on. Those examples alone call into question all other statistics released by the board, including last year's claim of a 75 per cent success rate.
Perhaps it was eagerness to appear to be succeeding that led the board to embellish its record. Whatever the motive, it was counter-productive. Facts must be faced.
It is universally recognised that it is next to impossible at the moment to find new jobs for all unskilled workers. The economy is in transition, and most recruitment is focused on highly trained employees with computer and language skills.
All that can be expected from retraining schemes is that they identify the jobs that are available and fit the right applicants to the courses. Since there are 135 training bodies (TBs), monitored by a Course Development Committee (CDC), assisted by a Course Vetting Sub-committee (CVSC), this task should have been fairly straightforward.
A side-effect of the board's work should be to identify the depth of the long-term unemployment situation to enable the Government to plan strategies. Hiding the extent of the problem only makes that more difficult to achieve.
