ITF, NECA SIGN MoU

The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nigerian Employees Consultative Association (NECA) to design and implement technical and vocational skills training programmes for Nigerians.

The initiative is one of the strategies which ITF is using to make technical and vocational skills available in the country. The Director-General of the Industrial Training Fund, Associate Professor Longmas Sambo Wapmuk who disclosed this during the signing of a collaborative skills acquisition pact with NECA, also stressed that the nation’s emphasis on certificates was hampering industrial development, and urged for greater focus on technical and vocational skills acquisition.

Wapmuk said “if the federal government must achieve its target of becoming one of the world’s largest economies by the year 2020, then greater attention must shift from certificates to skills acquisition”.

Professor Wapmuk said in most of these developed and developing countries, emphasis was not so much on certificates but skills acquisition through which people get themselves into entrepreneurship groups and thereon organized to become self employed.