A book titled Off To A Good Start: Your Guide To The World Of Work came out of a World Of Work programme by the National Initiative For Service Excellence (NISE).
This book was written based on a survey done in 2006 – Evaluation Of The Readiness Of School Leavers For Entry To The World Of Work.
The survey identified a number of inadequacies among secondary school leavers entering the job market. It also identified some of the attributes employers were looking for in school leavers.
Speaking during the official launch of the Republic Bank (Barbados) Limited’s Youth Link Apprenticeship programme recently at the Grand Salle, Tom Adams Financial Centre, NISE chief executive officer Kim Tudor said over 4 000 copies of the book were now in the island’s secondary schools.
“Working with new entrants into the world of work is something that we at NISE take very seriously and we have done quite a bit of research on what it is that employers are looking for in the workplace.
“We have been able to share this research with the Ministry of Education and [Inter-American Development Bank] and we were fortunate to be told by the IDB that we were the only people in the English-speaking Caribbean who had done this kind of research,” she said.
“To that end we have developed a book . . . . We developed that book, all of 175 pages, and thanks to the kind generosity of Republic Bank we were able to print that book and put 150 copies in all of the secondary schools in Barbados,” she added.
Tudor later told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY that NISE would be conducting a follow-up survey to determine if there were improvements and introduce an electronic version of the book.
“Right now it is a book, but what we want to do is move it to an interactive Web-based course of study instead of just a book.
“Before we Web-enable the existing book, we want to see how they have transitioned,” Tudor said. (MM)
