Dr Ishmael Yamson, Board Chairman of MTN Ghana, has urged a fundamental shift in how Ghana values technical and vocational skills, warning that the country’s long-term development will remain stalled if skilled technicians continue to be treated as inferior to white-collar professionals.
Speaking at the 77th Annual New Year School and Conference on Monday, January 6, 2025, Dr Yamson said Ghana could not build a sustainable and competitive economy while welders, engineers and artisans were denied the respect and remuneration accorded to professionals in banking and corporate offices.
According to him, the country must urgently rethink its attitude towards technical work if it hopes to reset its economy.
“This mindset must be reset,” Dr Yamson said. “In a reset Ghana, skilled technicians should command the same respect and pay as a bank manager.”
He observed that Ghana was producing increasing numbers of graduates whose education did not align with the realities of a modern economy, leaving many young people unemployed despite years of formal schooling.
“We are producing thousands of graduates from our high schools, colleges and universities who are unemployable because their skills do not match market needs,” he said. “We are training students for the economy of the 1980s, not for 2030.”
Dr Yamson warned that the widening gap between education and industry was undermining job creation and fuelling frustration among young people, many of whom now view migration as their only viable option.
He stressed that meaningful reform must begin with a reset of Ghana’s education system, particularly at the tertiary level. University programmes, he argued, should no longer be designed in isolation from industry demands.
“University curricula should not be written solely by professors behind closed doors,” he said. “They must be developed in partnership with industry bodies.”
Dr Yamson emphasised that Ghana’s future growth would not be driven by traditional white-collar professions alone, but by practical and technical expertise tied directly to production and industrial expansion.
“The development of this country will not be driven by lawyers, sociologists and political scientists alone,” he said. “It will be driven by welders, mechatronics engineers, agronomists and toolmakers.”
He noted that the persistent neglect of technical and vocational skills had contributed to graduate unemployment, deepening skills gaps and low productivity, even as industries struggled to find workers with the right competencies.
Placing his remarks within a broader call for a national economic reset, Dr Yamson said efforts to stabilise inflation and strengthen the currency would not succeed without deeper structural reforms.
He argued that Ghana must urgently realign its education and skills development priorities to prepare the workforce for emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence, green energy and advanced manufacturing.
“This mindset must be reset,” he reiterated, warning that failure to act would result in generations of young people being trained for jobs that no longer exist.