By Narayan Ammachchi
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has agreed to lend Mexico $170 million to help the Spanish-speaking country provide technical-skill training to young people eager to gain employment.
The bank expects the fund to benefit 8 million Mexican students over the next four years. Redesigning the education curricula is said to be among the conditions attached to the agreement. In addition, the program will provide financial support for learning in the workplace to 16,000 students and training for 4,000 teachers.
Mexico says it will use the money to fund its technical upper secondary education, vocational training, and job-skills development program, offered mainly to youths aged between 16 and 18.
Analysts say the IDB’s monetary support will overhaul Mexico’s vocational training and skill development programs, bringing in hundreds of thousands of skilled laborers to the job market.
“Seventy percent of students in the final year of secondary school receive only minimal or inadequate basic skills training, and only 40 percent of employers report that graduates are prepared to enter the labor market,” said IDB citing official statistics.
Experts say the government plans to partner with private firms and HR companies to help the trainers understand what skills employers look for in the graduates they want to employ.
Analysts have long been saying that Mexico’s future growth prospects will depend heavily on how well it manages and develops the skills of its workforce.
Despite high demand from Mexico’s thriving tech sector, and high supply from the colleges and universities — which churn out 90,000 IT graduates a year — there are large numbers of unemployed tech workers despite a simultaneous shortage of talent sufficiently skilled in the specialized areas companies require to fill positions on temporary projects.
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