Ghanaian youth have been encouraged to venture into the sector of facility management to take advantage of the job market to help reduce the rising incidence of unemployment in the country.
Mr Sampson Opare Agyeman, the President of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), Ghana Chapter, explained that the facility management industry had huge untapped potentials but there were few professionals to harness them.
He therefore urged young people to get themselves enrolled to be trained as facility management professionals to position themselves well to take advantage of the numerous benefits in the sector.
Mr Agyeman made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on the sidelines of an engagement with some students of the Bolgatanga Technical University in the Upper East Region.
The engagement was part of a nationwide tour of technical universities to encourage students to study facility management as a profession.
Facility management focuses on ensuring the functionality, safety and sustainability of the buildings, infrastructure and real estate among other built environments.
“We want to let the students understand this profession called facility management and the opportunities that come with it including jobs, entrepreneurship and education,” he said.
The President demystified the notion that Ghana lacked maintenance culture leading to fast deterioration of buildings and attributed the situation to lack of professionals to manage them.
He said it was time for the educational sector especially the tertiary level to be restructured to offer facility management courses to train more professionals to contribute to improving the sector.
“We are hoping that five years to come, if we have programmes in the universities on facility management and the universities are teaching the strategies, then we will see that our building environment would greatly see change,” he added.
Mr Agyeman indicated that facility management run through about eight of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and underscored the need for stakeholders to focus on the sector to create resilient employment for the youth.
“The facility management opportunities are so broad that graduates can become self-employed, work as service providers in the area of maintenance operations, janitorial services, energy and water management and sustainability among others,” he said.
