PRESIDENT of Jamaica Trade & Invest, Robert Gregory, says an important step in achieving economic growth for Jamaica, is to reposition the country as one with a high-skill/high-wage workforce. This, he said, will not only attract better paying development projects but will serve as a catalyst for increased training among the population.

"This position of a low-skill/low-wage workforce is not doing us any good. When we have a profile of a low-wage/low-skill, untrained workforce we attract development that bring jobs that don't require education or training and which are low paying.

"When we project a different profile, a profile that we create education and training, then we attract investment that brings jobs that require educated persons, trained, certified persons, and those jobs pay good money," he said.

Gregory, who was one of three presenters at a forum on gender imbalance and its implications for national development at the Pegasus hotel last Wednesday evening, said that over the past 15 years, statistics indicating that 75 per cent of the Jamaican workforce is untrained and uncertified for the work they do, has been bandied about. He said, however, that the figures no longer represented the real situation and that the country needed to stop advertising them.

"This business about 70 per cent of our workforce is untrained is a fallacy. It's not true. It misrepresents [our situation] and puts us in a bad light," he said.

Gregory, who is the former executive director of the HEART/Trust NTA, said since the training agency began operations in 1982, 326,000 individuals have completed its training programmes. The number of people certified between 2000 and 2007, total 168,017.

Citing figures from the Planning Institute of Jamaica's 2006 economic and social survey, he pointed out that males represent 57.6 per cent of the nearly 1.2 million-strong Jamaican workforce. Males dominate the areas of skilled agriculture and fisheries (81.9 per cent), craft & related trade (88.6 per cent) and plant and machine operation (92 per cent).

According to the same source, females dominate clerical positions (74.9 per cent) while service workers in shopping/ marketing/sales account for 63.7 per cent. The remaining groups, labelled professionals, senior officials technicians as well as elementary occupations are almost evenly distributed between the genders.

"This snapshot questions whether our workforce has been adequately prepared to take on the process and challenges of national development.The quality and the investment attractiveness of the workforce must be of paramount consideration in how we prepare our 1.2 million workforce. The average years of formal schooling, the percentage of tertiary graduates and the training of certified graduates are critical in how we position and promote the country," said Gregory.

Arguing that much of the philosophy that informs our education policies today is rooted in slavery and colonisation when manual labour was despised, Gregory said the division between the academic and the vocational ought not to exist and should not be the benchmark in how we prepare males and females to add value to the Jamaican economy. "It's nonsense," he said.

"In my capacity as president of Jamaica Trade and Invest, I would like to clearly state that this matter of the preparedness of the workforce as the centre of the whole to achieve economic well-being and prosperity for all Jamaicans - it is my position that [we] must focus our resources on how to involve our people and workers to learn how to learn, to learn how to do, to learn how to live and work with others and to learn how to be. Self-respect, self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-confidence," he said.