The Central Provincial Office of the Vocational Training Authority (VTA), was declared open by Chairman VTA, Ravi Jayawardene (Attorney at Law) at Katugastota, Kandy recently. This is the initial step of the VTA’s future plans of decentralising the administrative functions of the authority.
The decision to decentralise the establishment was taken by its current Chairman and the Board of Directors after scrutinising the bottlenecks and the problems faced by the Authority in carrying out its functions, an informed source from the authority told the Sunday Observer.
Accordingly, the mandate of the provincial VTA offices will go beyond that of decentralised vocational training centres. They will function as independent offices with administrative and financial management autonomy. They would provide a similar service to that of the VTA, in recruiting trainees, providing career counselling, assessing, providing further/higher training and placement with local employees.
The decentralisation is also expected to speed up the assessment and certification process. It would help to complete assessing the trainees facing the level 3 examinations of the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ-Level3) within one month of the last date of the written examination and to issue certificates to all examinees of NVQ-Level 4 within two months, said sources.