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It's the Association of Electric Utilities in the Caribbean - CARILEC - which is holding its Human Resources and Public Relations conference at the Radisson this week. The theme of the conference is "Achieving the Synergies: Corporate Leadership, PR and HR" and the association plans on achieving that synergy through improved communication and leadership within and among member companies. Now you may ask, what does PR and HR have to do with you? Well according to BEL's CEO Jeffrey Locke, improving these departments will lead to increased customer satisfaction.

Allison Jean, Executive Director, CARILEC
"From the banner and the other paraphernalia that we have, you would see that the theme for this year's conference is "Achieving the Synergies: Corporate Leadership, PR and HR" and through that theme, we want to bring a focus on effective communication above our internal and our external customers, because we recognized that it is quite important for that communication to continue, in order that we can display a positive image and build a brand at the utility companies in the region."

Thornley Myers, Chairman, Board of Directors
"Energy is such an important part of the development of any society. I don't know of any society that is being able to provide a high quality of life for its people that is pure energy or any society that is rich, that hasn't been able to provide reliable and high quality power. So, that's essentially what we are focusing in, in this environment and recognizing the importance of communication."

Jeffrey Locke, CEO, Belize Electricity Limited
"One of the challenges I gave in my speech last night, was the matter of getting sufficient engineers, hiring engineers and we see it as a challenge to the HR and PR functions, to make BEL an attractive company for your scientists. And so I am hoping that the group over the next few days can solve that one for us. A few decades ago, power engineering was the attractive engineering, but with technology, we've seen the change. BEL, in particular is introducing a lot of automation into how it does things. It's not only the power engineers, but electronic engineers and so on. So, we need to start working with the young scientist from an early age, going into the schools, trying to let them understand the future of BEL, even in the matter of renewables and so if we could start work with them earlier, doing internships, promoting BEL as a good employer, showing to them, how we've treated our staff over the years. All of those things then help to make BEL an attractive company."

The conference began yesterday and will conclude on Friday March 20th.