Training is an investment, not an expense for an organisation. Trained employees should yield higher productivity, and the organisation, along with the nation, will accrue lower production costs, higher profits, and will have more foreign currency to improve our infrastructure for the long run. Training increases employees’ self-esteem, motivation, loyalty, and also productivity.
Our labour is cheap, so some organisations hire them and put them to work without any proper training, for which they fail to perform well and we don’t even bother finding out why. Many retail stores are overstaffed but their customer service is very poor, including the upscale ones. On the other hand, most of the employees lack soft skills and are not courteous enough. Trained workers are efficient and much more productive. They can get things done within half the time and effort that an untrained, inefficient worker will need. In this day and age we have to be competitive, and to survive we need trained and skilled workers.
Most new employees manage to get into the RMG sector without any training, equipped with professional backgrounds as farmers, fishermen, or homemakers. But they decide to come to the city and work for the garment industry since it pays better than their previous occupation, never taking into account the importance of formal training in such a field. On the other hand, we do lack sufficient training institutions to train the workforce for our RMG sector. They have very little formal education to learn the supervising skills to begin with.
Training benefits employees in many ways: It increases their sense of ownership in the workplace, they become more productive, organised, flexible, and it makes them better in meeting the needs of external and internal customers. It also helps build new skills and abilities in many areas such as decision-making, to make them more efficient.
Organisations should have long-term, flexible, and structured training and development programs. They should focus on individual employee’s needs. This allows individuals to be identified as having the potential and desire to play a better role in taking part in training, and to develop their managerial skills and leadership capability. Each and every garments factory in Bangladesh should offer employees both on-the-job and off-the-job training, and it should be an ongoing process.
In the last seven years, Bangladeshi women’s participation doubled in our economic activity. The World Trade Organisation announced that Bangladesh is the second largest exporter in the RMG sector, and 80% of the labour in this industry is made up of women. RMG is the largest employer for women. It has created employment opportunities for women from rural areas, who never had any opportunity to be a part of a formal workforce.
These women usually have very little formal training in their first job; they acquired it mostly through training. If they had formal training at least once a year they would have contributed more to our economy. The same is true for our labourers overseas. They also have very little formal training.
In the RMG sector there are currently two million workers employed. The skill-distribution survey in this area was 20% unskilled (helpers) and 30% semi-skilled. This is an implication of an urgent need to train at least one million currently employed workers. In addition, each year, 400,000 additional workers are needed due to the combined factors of industry growth and employee turnover, so the current annual output of roughly 6,000 skilled labours is inadequate. On the other hand, the gap between supply and demand for mid-level managers, such as line supervisors, is significant. The estimated demand in 2009 for mid-level managers was 25,000, while supply was virtually nothing.
A major factor in the RMG sector is the shortage of qualified workers and mid-level managers. Because of this issue, the industry is unable to shift from simpler to more sophisticated and high-volume products. Bangladesh has come a long way in the RMG sector. It started exporting garments through subcontracting in 1978 with only nine small factories, employing a few thousand people.
In over three decades, this sector has achieved tremendous growth because of policy support from the government, private sector entrepreneurs, and the extremely hard-working labourers.
Currently, approximately 80% of the total export earnings come from the RMG sector, and the number of RMG factories is about 5,000. Earnings from RMG export have exceeded $19bn with 145 countries using “made in Bangladesh” products. Experts are saying the RMG export numbers in Bangladesh can be made more than double by 2020, which will increase our foreign reserve, improve our economy, and create more jobs.
The government and private sectors has a significant role to play in training our workforce. Without proper training, Bangladesh won’t be able to compete with other countries in the RMG sector and in manpower exporting in different countries. Trained labourers are happier and more productive, and can increase our foreign currency reserve and make us number one in the RMG sector in the world. I urge the policymakers to think seriously about this and take measurable steps regarding this issue.