Career counselling training — to address unemployment by up-skilling youth to enable them to apply and maintain job opportunities — was run Monday.

Held at the Development Bank of Samoa, it was organised by Samoa Victim Support Group (S.V.S.G.) and funded by the International Labour Organization (I.L.O.).

More than 40 youth who are registered with the S.V.S.G. attended and it was led by Edward Bernard, who is the I.L.O. Senior Programme Officer based in Suva, Fiji.

Mr. Bernard said the training is basically a career counselling training to prepare youth to take on skills that will prepare them to find a job.

“And also see what are their dreams, goals and aspirations and how do they set long term adjustments and how do they achieve the motivation to achieve their goals and dreams.

“We did a lot of exercises like application letters and today for real life situations and coming down to what they want to achieve in their life and also when they enter the job market how they can keep a job.

“These skills are very significant because I.L.O. received the statistics from a survey in 2017 but released in 2018 from the Government statistics, which stated that youth unemployment has risen to 31 per cent from 15 per cent, which was from the previous years,” he said.

Mr. Bernard told the Samoa Observer that the participants said they did not have anywhere to turn to for career counselling.

“This morning we asked the participants — where do they go for career counselling and they seemed to be silent — and that shows that there is gap. I think the gap is the link from school to work place and that is what we provide by linking them from school to the job markets on how to apply.

“We cannot guarantee jobs, what we can guarantee is improve the employee ability to know how to apply for jobs, undergo interviews. 

“In terms of the long term, we also asked them how they want to see themselves in the next five years and they began to draft ideas to achieve those long term goals and so we successfully crafted their five-year plans in terms of after this training they will work on,” he added.

I.L.O. national coordinator to Samoa, Tomasi Peni said the role of their organisation is to assist the youths, and is also a partnership between the Ministry of Women, Community & Social Development and private sector.

“We also provided the trainer and he is one of our qualified officers and this training is aimed for the youths and to address youth employment and hopefully with these skills they may have better access to employment opportunities.”