Govt plans skills development for 1.5 million RMG workers

Published : 28 Nov 2019, 15:14

Sahos Desk

The government has taken an initiative to implement a skills development training program for some 15 lakh RMG workers, aimed at ensuring the sector's sustainable development and addressing the challenges ahead.

An eight-member' Training Conducting Committee,' chaired by the Director-General of the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), was established to provide training for RMG workers in order to find a way to conduct the training programme.

The other committee members are from the Ministry of Commerce's Textile Committee, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Labor and Education, Department of Textile, BEPZA, BGMEA, BKMEA, and EPB's Deputy Director of Compliance and Monitoring Group.

The committee was recently formed in conjunction with the 2019 RMG Training Plan, which will carry out training-related activities and select the organizations that provide education. The process for enlisting garment workers to provide training will be determined.

It will give the list of the time and specific training plan to the respective organizations to recruit the actual employee who continues his / her job in a garment.

The panel must adjust, include and authorize the curriculum that the learning delivering company must devise.

It will post ads about the training program in print or electronic media.

The committee will need to sit at least once in every two months to review the training activities. But the meeting will take place whenever appropriate.

When required, any delegate from any agency or entity involved may be co-opted by the panel.
Approximately 40 lakh people are currently employed in the RMG market, while there is tremendous room for hiring more skilled labor here.

Industry insiders believe that there is no other scope than enhancing skills and skills of workers in the RMG sector to achieve the USD 50 billion export by 2021.

BGMEA Senior Vice President Faisal Samad said that retraining is needed by the existing workforce itself to improve their efficiency to boost production capacity to compete on the global market.

Speaking of the higher-level management side, Faisal Samad, also managing director Surma Garments Ltd, said the country has a huge gap in providing mid-level and senior-level management with the workforce.

"We're trying to meet this gap with foreign nationals in some cases," he said.

He said that if general manager-level workforce is provided with necessary training, there will be no need for foreigners at the upper management level.

In a report on the RMG sector last year, the Center for Policy Dialog (CPD) found that around 13 percent of the country's garment factories employed top-level management international experts who remit over USD 500 crore each year from Bangladesh.

The factory owners hire experts from outside the country to fill the gap in the absence of skilled workforce, especially in merchandising, design and marketing as well as in the operation of sophisticated machines.

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