Energy Ministry hunts 50 engineering grads

Professor Kenneth Julien, left, is greeted by Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley during The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Trinidad and Tobago section Festschrift Conference closing at the HYATT Regency.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Franklin Khan is on the hunt for 50 en­gi­neer­ing grad­u­ates to fill spe­cial­ist roles with­in the min­istry.
Row­ley made the an­nounce­ment as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the In­sti­tute of Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ics En­gi­neers' (IEEE) Festschrift Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency on Mon­day evening.
Speak­ing to the crowd of en­gi­neer­ing prac­ti­tion­ers and revered spe­cial­ists, Row­ley said tax­pay­ers had in­vest­ed a lot of mon­ey in the younger gen­er­a­tion, but de­spite many of them at­tain­ing their qual­i­fi­ca­tions they are lost with­in the sys­tem and many are now em­ployed.
“We have a lot of en­gi­neers in this coun­try who you (tax­pay­ers) paid for, in a va­ri­ety of uni­ver­si­ties, who are left un­der the floor and left to with­er some­where,” the PM said.
“I have in­struct­ed the Min­is­ter (of En­er­gy)…us­ing the skills of a for­mer per­ma­nent sec­re­tary, who’s vol­un­teer­ing, to go look in the sys­tem and see where we have aban­doned these peo­ple. “Some of them with the best train­ing com­ing from the best uni­ver­si­ties in the world and wind up aban­doned, ig­nored or frus­trat­ed some­where in Trinidad and To­ba­go or worse; would have been dri­ven out of Trinidad and To­ba­go as a re­sult of lack of ap­pre­ci­a­tion.”
He said Khan was in­struct­ed to give these new re­cruits spe­cial­ist po­si­tions so that they may de­vel­op the nec­es­sary skills to take the coun­try for­ward.
The PM said he hopes this ven­ture will be able to un­earth the coun­try's next Pro­fes­sor Ken­neth (Ken) Julien, whom he de­scribed as a key play­er re­spon­si­ble for de­vel­op­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go to where it has reached to­day.
Julien was al­so ho­n­oured at the event.
Row­ley al­so said he will be at­tend­ing a two-day meet­ing of the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket Econ­o­my (CSME) at the Hy­att Re­gency next week. The key con­ver­sa­tion at the meet­ing, he ex­plained, will be al­le­ga­tions by oth­er mem­bers that Trinidad and To­ba­go has an un­fair ad­van­tage in Cari­com which needs to be ad­dressed. He said Cari­com coun­ter­parts were com­plain­ing that T&T man­u­fac­tur­ers were get­ting an un­fair ad­van­tage be­cause of cheap en­er­gy prices they were be­ing af­ford­ed here.
“I don't know what would be the out­come of that meet­ing but Trinidad and To­ba­go has forced that con­ver­sa­tion on the heads of Cari­com.” Source: The Guardian, Nov 2018