We Love Certificates More Than Jobs

“What luck for rulers that men do not think”, is a popular quote attributed to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and this age-old saying is turning out to be true in our contemporary society where critical thinking and solution-based thinking is in great demand at all levels of society

If we were a society that has a majority of right thinking people, a good number of our unemployment related problems would have been solved. Indeed, thinking right results directly in living right and those who develop the habit of right thinking can rule themselves.

For decades, our people have complained of ever rising figures in unemployment. For decades we have known that the number of vacancies in our public sector cannot accommodate the large numbers of graduates our universities churn out each year. For decades we have known that many of our University graduates who leave school in hope of securing ‘non-existent’ white-collar jobs end up disillusioned and bitter…with some becoming useless and a burden on their families.

Yet a majority of us continue to think that our young ones and youth can get employment if and only they study arts and sciences at the university.

We have maintained a strategy that has failed for decades and continue to fail us yet we continue to maintain same strategy as a panacea to our challenges on unemployment. What other evidence do we need to conclude that there is a deficiency in our thinking?

Despite the glaring reality that white-collar jobs in the public sector are non-existent, we live in a society that continues to look down on students that opt for technical and vocational training rather than the arts and sciences. We have a strong but wrong perception that technical and vocational education is for second class students who did not get their first-choice options in school.

We seem to seek glory in getting higher certificates rather than in getting the type of training that would be a guarantee for well-paying jobs.

That faulty thinking is evident in our everyday lives. It explains why we have many university-trained caterers that are unemployed while almost all our local food joints are run by and belong to persons who have no formal training in catering.

Persons who are in the catering business by sheer passion for cooking or learnt how to cook from their grandmothers but lack the requisite managerial and customer service skills or even how to brand themselves to be competitive.

We ought to face reality, start thinking right and place some more value on technical and vocational education that has a ready market for jobs rather than continue to place premium on higher academic credentials that hardly teaches how to create jobs.