The St Vincent and the Grenadines Port Authority (SVGPA) continues to support the youth and the development of our human resources.

At a ceremony last Thursday at the Methodist Church Hall in Kingstown, the SVGPA presented three Clarence Keizer memorial scholarships to students who {{more}}wrote the 2015 CPEA examination and performed exceptionally well.

Every year, these scholarships are offered to employees’ children who score above 60 per cent in what was the Common Entrance Examination and now is the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment (CPEA).

Featured speaker at the ceremony Deborah Charles encouraged the awardees to grab every opportunity given to them and set goals for their future.

She also urged the students to be dedicated to their work and to always plan for the next day as “a person who fails to plan plans to fail.”

Charles told the students that setting time for study is an important part of achieving their goals, because with rest and play no work is done. The experienced teacher advised parents to give their children the tools necessary to ensure their progress in society, to love them, and give them only what they need and not everything that they want. “Your success is determined by how determined you are,” she said.

Also addressing the awardees was president of the National Workers Movement (NWM) Noel Jackson. He, like Charles, encouraged the scholarship recipients to take advantage of every opportunity offered to them, since the academic and job markets are becoming increasingly competitive. The trade union leader noted that this only shows the development of and the advancement of human resources here in SVG.

He disclosed that recently, an employer told him that his next batch of employees would be required to have a degree for the position being offered.

“Persons who came out of the Community College are working at some of the Syrian stores in town…this is phenomenal and some people may say ‘oh you wanna tell me college students doing that work;’ you better get accustomed to it… because it means therefore that the human resource of the country is developing; it means therefore that jobs are becoming more competitive,” he said.

Jackson also expressed the pride he feels when he goes the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital and sees so many local doctors whom he described as persons who took advantage of the opportunity offered to them.

He encouraged adults to grasp the opportunity to further their education or to continue their education with the Adult and Continuing Education Programme.

Twenty-one students currently hold scholarships from the SVGPA, of which five are at the tertiary level and 16 are in secondary institutions across the island. (CM)