The Management of Youth Employment Agency (YEA) with the approval of the governing board has introduced Job Centre Ghana to play a crucial role in co-ordinating and facilitating job placements and creation of employment opportunities for the youth of Ghana. The Centre which is a government initiative is initiated to compete with the array of HR Consultancies and private on-line job recruitment agencies in the country.
The YEA Management conceptualise the creation of the Job Centre in response to the Agency’s vision and mission statements that form the bedrock of its core mandate to oversee the development, co-ordination, supervision and facilitation of job creation for the youth and related matters. The Vision Statement requires the Agency to be an outstanding public service agency facilitating and creating sustainable employment opportunities for the youth nationwide while the Mission Statement seeks to lead the co-ordination of employment opportunities and creation of jobs for the youth in Ghana.
The primary goal of the Job Centre Ghana is to strategically position the Agency to serve as a one-stop shop to provide skills and connect job seekers to employers aimed at addressing the unemployment concerns of the youth of the country. The Job Centre comes as a novelty and an all-encompassing concept among its competitors in that it encapsulates three basic components namely On-line portal, Job Centre (physical location) and Training Hub. Online portal The On-line portal is basically an On -line component of the YEA website for both job seekers and employers where job seekers can log on, register and apply for jobs of interest as advertised by employers. Job seekers can upload their Curriculum vitae (CV) and other relevant documents to help secure jobs.
Employers on the other hand can also hook up to the page to register their business or institution, place advertisements for vacancies and employment avenues for the youth or request the Job Centre to recruit personnel for them based on an agreed terms of reference. Job Centre (Physical location) The Job Centre has a physical location component also known as Walk in Centre to be attached to YEA offices and manned by qualified staff. The Walk in Centre serves as an avenue to provide advisory, mentoring and counselling services to prospective job seekers. The facility doubles as Jobs Clinic where job seekers are diagnosed and appropriate workshops conducted to meet their needs. The workshops aim at providing skills, training, coaching in preparing attractive CVs, prepare job seekers for interviews etc. These workshops and seminars are organised periodically based on diagnosed interest areas and needs of society. Training Hub The Training Hub provides the youth with the requisite skills to prepare them to compete for the limited jobs that are made available. The training is to provide them with professional skills where employers do not need to spend resources training new recruits.
Personnel employed from YEA Job Centre are ready to work on the go. The trainings are handled by professional bodies and institutions who work in partnership with YEA Job Centre. The training for the candidates places them at advantageous positions for fair competition and upgrade of their knowledge. This is against the backdrop of the fact that training and capacity building is indispensable to the development of human resource in every sector of the economy. The employer bears no cost in the whole training process. Job Centre Ghana is key to the Agency’s effort at solving youth unemployment by establishing a quick and efficient match between Job Seekers and Employers. It also concerns itself with building strategic partnership/synergies with employers with the view to providing them with efficient labour to assist in their operations.
The target group are graduates and undergraduates with little or no work experience and unskilled and low skilled workforce. The administrative structure of the centre is the creation of a Secretariat headed by Job Centre Manager who sees to its day to day administration. As a consequence of the seriousness the Agency attaches to the creation of the Job Centre, it has also taken the initiative to build the capacity of all her core staff to ensure they are well equipped to implement the objectives of Job Centre Ghana.
