Lecturers to get a feel of industry before training others

It is not common to hear of lecturers going for industrial attachment. Field attachment, as generally understood, is meant to expose students in tertiary institutions to the real world of work.

Now there is a twist to this understanding. Kenya Polytechnic University College (KPUC), a constituent institution of the University of Nairobi, will start sending its lecturers out for industrial attachment. Yes, lecturers.

It is part of the bigger scheme to bridge the troubling gap between institutions of higher learning and industry requirements in terms of the skills imparted on students.

KPUC has entered into an agreement with the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) to facilitate the equipping of students with the prevalent work skills so that by the time they graduate, they are not behind the prevailing job requirements.

Lecturers, being the critical link, have to be well exposed, hence the idea of sending them on field attachments from time to time.

The new approach, according to the principal of KPUC, Prof Francis Aduol, recognises the need for industry-based training of lecturers so that they can readily adapt their teaching to developments in the industry based on tangible experience.

“Now we will have in addition to the students, our lecturers going into the industry for three solid months after every three years of having worked with us,” he announced on February 8 at the signing of the Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) between KPUC and KAM.

The cooperation will also see industry professionals being invited to give lectures at the college more regularly, said KAM CEO, Ms Betty Maina.

At the same time, as Prof Aduol intimated, the university college will endeavour to motivate such professionals to do part-time teaching there.

His plan is to have at least a third of KPUC’s lecturers made up of practising players in the industry.

The cooperation between the university college and the industry is expected to enable the learning institution to meet its mandate of imparting skills that are relevant to the industry, so as to effectively support industrialisation, said Ms Maina.

This in essence creates a platform for attachment places for students and lecturers from the institution in any of the affiliate companies under KAM, numbering about 700.

But the icing on the cake is the initiative’s venture that seeks to enhance training on business development.

“The key areas of focus of the strategic partnership include innovation, business start-up courses, business plan development, cash-flow management and marketing development,” explained Ms Maina.

“Beyond this, we are also looking at building the technological capacity of our youths.

Recently, we have seen our young people, with the right support, coming up with new technological innovations that we didn’t deem possible before,” she observed.

“So here too, we will accordingly be looking at practical innovations by our youths that we can scale up.”

With this, she said it was going to be a mutually beneficial cycle of sustained industrial growth and increased development of higher quality technical work force.