By Barrister Fabian Awhen
The world over, and more specifically the Western Economies, recorded rapid economic growth and development because a great premium was placed on intensive and extensive planned training programmes to adequately cater to the needs of the various sectors of their economy.
Human resources development is a key and indispensable factor in the sustained socio-economic advancement of any economy. This is why adequate attention has always been directed at making available highly trained manpower to effectively service all sectors of any given economy.
Nigeria, and indeed Cross River State, as an emerging economy, faces a lot of structural imbalances and challenges, one of which is the dearth of highly trained skilled and specialized manpower required by both the public and the private sectors of the economy
In areas such as agriculture, medicine, technology, and accounting. management, banking, engineering, insurance, and others the shortage of manpower in these fields could seriously hamper accelerated development, particularly in third-world societies.
It is in the bid to redress this situation in Nigeria that public policy formulators have continued to place a premium on manpower development, and the state is not an exception.
Constant training and retraining of human resources by any government for optimum results in the utilization of its materials resources cannot be over-emphasized.
In Cross River State, manpower development has been a continuous exercise and it has always received priority attention in government agenda.
For instance, the present administration has not hidden its desire to give maximum attention to manpower training and development through a deliberate policy thrust.
The government endorsement of a good workforce has adequately been highlighted by successive Chief Executives who have repeatedly spoken of the importance of manpower development and training of workers in both private and public sectors as a pivot for economic and social growth.
Indeed, the present state administration should go a step further to turn policy pronouncements into concrete actions by training and retraining the workforce to promote high productivity.
Yet this is hardly sufficient. But based on the peculiar position of the state as one, which suffers acute shortage of manpower in strategic areas of the economy, it calls for more profound action to redress the imbalance.
The State Government should go into partnership with ASCON for the training of the State Government workforce in line with the government’s determination to vigorously pursue the reformation of the public service to enable it to withstand the challenges of a technologically advancing world.
The reforms are necessary to help the government realize its laudable ideals as well as enhance the optimum utilization of its human and material resources for the benefit of all Cross Riverians.
Research and technology have successfully expanded the degree of knowledge beyond the level the workforce can optimally cope with.
So that labour meets up with these scientific and technological changes in the work environment, the need for continuous training and retraining is the obvious way of avoiding redundancy of workers.
It should be noted that investment in manpower development is the only creative instrument to build a vibrant and self-reliant economy for sustained development in all dimensions. Hence, the private sector, should not only devote a substantial sum of their budgets towards manpower training and development but should also make manpower development and training a pivot of management activity as exemplified by the State Government.
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