With Guyana’s oil-driven economy expanding rapidly, the demand for engineers has grown significantly, with tertiary institutions struggling to churn out graduates at scale to keep up.
During a recent episode of the Energy Perspectives Podcast, Professor Paloma Mohamed-Martin, the first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana (UG), shared some insights into the university’s challenge of producing enough graduates to meet industry needs.
“Our engineering students, we can’t keep up, we can’t produce enough engineers (at) the university. People are hiring whole classes of engineers,” the Vice Chancellor said.
Oil production began offshore Guyana in December 2019, leading to a ripple effect across various sectors, including construction, and significantly increasing the demand for a larger workforce and skilled labour.
In response to this surge in demand for engineering professionals, UG has increased its student intake. Professor Mohamed-Martin noted that the university’s faculty of engineering and technology programmes have seen their intake numbers triple over the years. She said, “So our classes went from, really struggling with maybe 20, 30, students’ intake in the faculty of engineering and technology, to tripling within the last four or five years.”
The Vice Chancellor also noted that the need for engineers is not limited to a single sector. She highlighted that UG is noticing a broad-based demand across various industries which puts additional pressure on their capacity to train and produce qualified engineers.
“Because we’re not only producing for oil and gas, we’re producing for the gold mines, the geologists and so on and for the construction industry, which is booming, so civil engineers, road engineers, electrical engineers,” she added, they are all in high demand.
