THE Director of the EKGS Culinary Institute, Efua Goode-Obeng Kyei, has charged the youth to work towards the acquisition of hands-on and vocational skills in addition to what they intend doing in life.

That, she said, was to ensure that they were well prepared for the future.

“My humble advice to them is that there is nothing like the acquisition of a skill. Indeed, no matter what you do you would need to have an additional skill that would support you.”

“In our enrolments we have people from the banking sector and other sectors who are here to acquire one form of skill or the other because they know that one day they would go on retirement and that it is the skills that they are acquiring now that would come in handy to support them at home,” she said, and “my advice is that the youth should do away with laziness, procrastination and then take a bold step to have a skill that would benefit them a lot.” 

Ms Kyei, who said this on the sidelines of the launch of the EKGS’s 25th anniversary logo last Wednesday in Accra, dismissed the notion that vocational training was for people who were not academically good since it involved measurement and understanding of English Language used for the application of certain ingredients, among other things.

“So, this industry is not for people who may not be academically good, you have to be knowledgeable and know what you are doing to be able to do things well,” she said.

According to her, the institute had since its establishment, trained over 7,000 people working in various fields and setting up their businesses across the country and retraining others as well and felt so fulfilled about the impact she had made in the lives of people.

The culinary industry, she said, was one critical area in the country since people could not do away with food and also entertainment, both of which were key to boosting tourism, a huge revenue generation sector that was yet to get the needed attention in terms of development of facilities, among other things.  

Courses offered at the institute included cake making and decoration, pastry making, cooking theory and floral décor.

Ms Kyei said the vision of the institute was to have that impact whereby the youth that were being trained would be well-grounded and so it was coming out with a package that would ensure that every student that passed out would have the basic tools to be able to set up on their own.

On the technology used for the work, she said it was now easy and that there were so many tools that had come in to reduce long processes.

“On the practical aspect it is a bit easier now because we have modern tools coming in to make the work easy.

On the other hand, due to the economic hardship, it had made cake making very expensive – I always pity my students because gathering money to do your practical is not easy,” she said.

The first student to be enrolled in the institute, Henrietta Kukua Barnes Danquah, congratulated the EKGS on the attainment of its 25th anniversary.

The Youth Tourism Ambassador of Ghana, James Amartey, urged the students to engage in some networking among themselves in order to strengthen their front.

SOURCE: Graphiconline