Over 30 graduates received their diplomas today from the Belize Training and Employment Center program. The program caters to men and women from different backgrounds and interests from Information Technology to sewing. A ceremony was held at the American-Belizean Technology and Education Center to honor these graduates and 2 of the graduates told us how the 8 week program will bring them closer to realizing their career-dreams.
G. TOE Washington, Regional Director, "Just us Belize"
"What this program is about is something called the "Central American Regional Security Initiatives" by the United States government. What we try to do is enhance the skills of the Belizeans, so that they can get jobs, so that they can stray away from criminal activities and enhanced themselves. So, what we've done is we've look at the entire Belize culture and we saw certain avenues such as customer service, hospitality and sales. We look at the IT information technology, we know the world is going that route. We decide to also train in that route and we also look at people who wants to use their hands for skills purposes, so as sewing and tailoring. Even though we are training these people and giving them skills, we have built relationships, so we can provide jobs for them. We don't promise anybody jobs, because it depends on your effort and yourself. We are going to teach you how to fish. We are not going to give you fish, but teach you how to do that. However, we build relationships so that we have opportunities to get jobs."
Alrick Cattouse, Graduate, IT program
"The program has been excellent. We've learnt a lot during the Photoshop, InDesign and also the Illustrator. The most one that was a bit challenging was WordPress, because it was new to us. We didn't expect getting WordPress in the IT program. My career path is to build websites and also to help as a computer technician - that's the job I am looking for."
Virginia Novelo, Graduate, Sewing
"We have become a family. We worked together and we had our ups and downs, but we learnt to go around it and there is some stuff that I learnt a lot, because what I know now is totally a compact - it's very uplifting."
Washington told us that the goal is to train at least 300 people a year. So far they have trained about 90.
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