The Ghana Employers Association (GEA) is collaborating with training institutions and industries to formulate a National Policy on industrial attachment to help improve the knowledge and skills base of students.

This was announced by Mr Victor Atta-Amponsah, Head of Human Resource Development of GEA, at the opening session of a day's national conference on Industrial Attachment in Accra on Wednesday.

It was attended by stakeholders from the employment sector and training institutions, to discuss identifying areas of study for industrial attachment, guidelines for industrial attachment, criteria for monitoring and evaluation of Interns, whether industrial attachment should form part of the grading system, guidelines for facilitating industry interaction, what should be the appropriate period for attachment and what should be the role of government in industrial attachment.

The conference on the theme: “Formulating a national policy on industrial attachment-the role of stakeholders” is to bring together industry, training institutions and government representative to discuss the formulation of the policy, which would focus on building effective collaboration between industry and training institutions to impart the requisite knowledge and skills that adequately prepares students for the job market.

Mr Atta-Amponsah said, it had become necessary to formulate such a policy because some students who undertook attachments in organisations were relegated to the background while others were being used as messengers, because there was no policy on industrial attachment; some companies and organisations more often undermined students on attachment.

Professor Daniel Buor, Vice Chancellor of Valley View University, indicated that industrial attachment was a system on the job training for white collar and professional careers, therefore students were expected to practice the things they learned in school.

He said the essence of industrial attachment was to develop the practical and competence of trainees and provide them with the requisite knowledge to contribute their quota towards developing society.

Prof. Buor said it was important for training institutions to aim at establishing links with industries for technical development and to know their skill gaps as well as to improve quality of training and obtaining materials for teaching, and case study to have a balanced assessment of trainees.

He said one of the challenges facing the industrial attachment was time lag in arrangement for attachment and advised that, a list of students should be submitted on time to ensure that the organisations had ample time to fix the trainees on schedules.

Prof. Buor said some industrial entities complained about the non-involvement in curricula development and final grading of students in their performance in the attachment assessment.

He noted that, the effectiveness of preparation of students for the job market through industrial attachment depended on the training institutions and employers to pursue training programmes, which would be complementary to each other.

Prof. Buor said, attachment should be seen as a functional aspect of the training programme, just as the classroom work which emphasised the theoretical perspective.

He urged government to play effective role and provide some logistics and administrative support to upgrade the burden of retraining of staff in government –funded institution.**