Licensed to skill: extending the ETC Skills Development Centre in Malta

Context

Malta’s Employment & Training Corporation (ETC) is a public corporation set up by an act of parliament in 1990. It is a body corporate with a distinct legal personality and is managed by a board of directors, which includes representatives from the various stakeholder groups and social partners. Its prime responsibility is to provide a public employment service, managing state-financed vocational training and apprenticeship schemes and maintaining labour market information.

The ETC offers a wide range of training courses that are open to both the unemployed and the employed who want to upgrade their skills. The courses cover a variety of subjects, classified under four headings: office-related courses, hospitality/caring skills courses, management skills courses and trade skills courses. The Corporation also runs the Night Institute for Further Technical Education, which responds to the skills needs of industry, as well as a series of traineeships, which are developed by the ETC in partnership with employers, their associations or other professional bodies.

Training programmes and schemes organised by the ETC are designed to respond to current and future labour market needs. This practice is facilitated by an ongoing dialogue with employers and employers’ representatives. In addition, the ETC is also responsible for the "Employment Barometer" (an in-depth analyses of current and future labour market needs undertaken with a large number of employers every six months), which identifies skills shortages and hence the training needs of employers.

With existing limited facilities the Corporation has not always been in a position to respond to identified needs and at times has had to resort to outsourcing, incurring addition costs.

Enhancing employability through skills development

The objective of the project is to extend the ETC’s Skills Development Centre. This extension, and the additional facilitates it will make available, will allow the ETC to increase the number of morning and evening courses it provides, thereby reaching more clients who want to update their occupational skill levels – a process ETC is already engaged in through its various initiatives including the Night Institute for Further Technical Education.

The new extension to the Skills Development Centre will cover an area of 550 m² and will include a number of new lecture rooms and workshops, equipped with modern training equipment and systems. The extension will also include a steel structure that will incorporate a bridge connecting the new extension with the existing block. The equipment to be installed includes audio visual equipment, projectors, interactive screens/boards, and DVDs with sound systems.

Results

It is estimated that the new extension, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2006, will help the ETC to double its training capacity thereby doubling its output to circa 10 000 clients per annum. In addition it will help the Corporation to reduce waiting times (currently circa 20 weeks) to less than 10 weeks and to be more responsive to the immediate needs of the labour market. In this regard, the ETC will continue to work closely with VET (Vocational Education and Training) institutions, representatives of Malta Enterprise as well as the Malta Employers Association (MEA) to provide education and training programmes that meet industries' needs.

It is anticipated that through appropriate training and encouragement those with low-skills will acquire new transferable and marketable skills and will subsequently become more employable.

The new extension will have the greatest impact on young job seekers in Malta, who make up the majority of ETC’s clients. It will also help to improve the services available to specific target groups. In particular, it will benefit women wishing to return to work, the longterm unemployed, those over 40, people with special needs, former drug addicts, alcoholics and correctional facilities' inmates, all of whom are given personal attention at the ETC.