ITF boosts 70,000 Nigerians with new job skills

Industrial Training Fund (ITF), in the past one year, has improved the skills of over 70,000 Nigerians to make them more employable, in the expansion and repositioning of its existing programmes.

Director-general of the fund, Sir Joseph Ari, said launch of new programmes like Women Skills Empowerment Programme, Training on Wheels, Passion to Profession, Graduate Employment Re-Skilling, as well as programmes like the National Industrial Skills Development Programme and the Technical Skills Development Project have all contributed to increasing the skills gap in the country.

He said this has helped to provide life skills for development and growth of the economy, which is being championed by President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.

Speaking at the weekend at the eighth interactive forum of the Apapa area office in Lagos, Ari said the ITF has worked towards resolving the problem of delayed payment to organisations that qualify for reimbursement.

Represented by the director of ICT, Mr. Dickson Onuorah, Ari said the ITF has paid N5.9 billion between September 2016 and  August 2017, to reimburse about 491 companies on an issue that was a recurring problem between the ITF and some of its stakeholders before the assumption of the new management.

“Our commitment is to continually improve and fast-track the process so that every company that is qualified under the reimbursement scheme will be expeditiously paid their claims,” he said.

On the theme of the forum, “Strategic HR Approaches in a Recovering Economy,” he said the current efforts, behind the demands of the ITF’s mandate, are premised on the belief that Nigeria’s ability to successfully negotiate the recession and achieve the policy goals of the Buhari administration rest on the fund’s ability to equip Nigerians as much as possible with life skills.

The manager of the ITF, Apapa area, Farouk Ahmed, said the theme was apt as human resource officers must know how to adapt more to their organisations to get the best from their workers.

The guest speaker at the event, general manager of Seven-Up Bottling Company, Mr. Steve Olayinka, said a modern human resource person must be a generalist, in tandem with line managers, and have a strategic human resource plan to function effectively.