Poor Education Could Cripple Business Growth
Low-quality education is jeopardizing business growth in Cambodia, and local graduates will not be employable in skilled jobs if the government does not quickly implement educational reforms, business executives warned Thursday at the Cambodian Market Intel 2013 seminar in Phnom Penh. During an hourlong panel discussion among five foreign business executives and the secretary-general of the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC), the businessmen said Cambodia would struggle to attract foreign investment without improving the quality of secondary and university education. Martin McCarthy, managing director and country representative of oil and gas conglomerate Total, said his organization has trouble finding local engineers capable of working on its projects. “Total has its own university and courses at local universities, because university is too late. We must start reforms at ages 14 or 15…with math, physics and chemistry,” Mr. McCarthy said. … An International Labor Organization (ILO) report released Thursday shows that less than half of Cambodia’s 7.2 million workers had completed primary school, while 35.5 percent had completed secondary education and just 3.8 percent had a university degree. … Grant Knuckey, CEO of ANZ Royal bank, who moderated the panel discussion, said jobs in the banking sector have increased 20 percent in the past year, and to keep up, he is leading an initiative with the Association of Banks in Cambodia to train future bank staff. … Gordon Peters, managing partner of Emerging Markets Consulting and another panelist at the discussion, said his company has been working with the ILO to conduct a regional study on employers’ views of their staff. Mr. Peters said that a majority of employers said that recent college graduates were not equipped with the skills they needed for employment. “Preliminary data in Cambodia show 20 to 30 percent of firms are reporting college graduates don’t have the necessary skills to meet their needs,” Mr. Peters said.
Joshua Wilwohl
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/phnom-penh-listed-as-nsa-collection-point-48188/
