Technical and language skills of vocational students need boosting
Play
Thailand needs to boost the skills of its vocational students to meet the greater demand and opportunities in the rapidly growing Asean labour market, a senior executive of the Federation of Thai Industries said.
FTI vice chairman Somyos Tangmeelarb urged concerned agencies to not only help improve the students’ technical knowledge and skills in computing and foreign languages, but also get to know more about other Asean countries.
He said the students should be “equipped with the know-how and how-to” of the fellow Asean nations, as the regional labour market is expected to grow 10 fold in the next decade.
“Now, the labour market needs about 40,000 technicians and the demand is expected to increase to 400,000 within 10 years,” said Somyos, adding that technical knowledge and skills and computer and language skills of Thai technicians were at the intermediate level so they had to improve.
He was speaking at a seminar held as part of the Asean Fair, jointly hosted by Nation Multimedia Group and the Education and Commerce ministries in Chiang Mai last Thursday.
Education Deputy Permanent Secretary Churairat Sangboonnum said the Education Ministry was trying to convince more students to take up vocational or technical education. Now, more students prefer general education. The ratio of students studying general and vocational or technical education was 60 to 40 per cent but the ministry aims to increase the number of vocational or technical students to a 50:50 ratio or 40:60 (general education students: vocational/technical students).
“We’re trying to change the attitude of parents and teachers so that they will encourage more students to go for vocational or technical education rather than higher education,” she said.
She added that the ministry had implemented three policies – raising students’ awareness about the Asean community, increasing their language ability, especially English and Chinese, and equipping them with vocational or technical skills to produce qualified personnel for the labour market.
“We have initiated a language enhancement project at pilot schools in which those schools have opened courses teaching languages used in our neighbouring countries. In an attempt to improve foreign languages, more schools have also sought collaboration with schools in other countries,” said Churairat.
Chatchai Luemprasert of the Department of Trade Negotiations said there would be more opportunities in terms of commerce when the AEC comes into effect in 2015 as the trading market would be wider. There are 600 million people in Asean and up to 2.5 billion people in Asean+6 (10 Asean members, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, India, and New Zealand).
“We have to adjust the quality of our products and services, especially food products. They must be safe and meet international standards. Our products are considered premium grade and we have to keep this standard and continue improving the quality. Our products’ trading will probably grow not only in Asean but also in Europe,” he said.
