This article draws from my 2023 research report, Understanding the Demand for and Supply of Skills in the Oil and Gas Industry in Ghana. At its core, it is about the political economy of skills.
The context is a Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system widely perceived as weak, set against a rapidly changing world of work where employers’ demand for knowledge, skills, and competencies has become the overriding currency for employment.
The rationale is to understand the complex relationship between Ghana’s education system and the future of work, particularly the role of TVET in national development. In this article, the “knowledge factor” refers to the underpinning abstract, disciplinary and codified theoretical knowledge behind operational, task-based skills – the WHY behind the HOW.
It is the powerful knowledge that makes a skill transferable, adaptable and progressive. Ghana’s education system was once the envy of Africa. In the early post-independence years, it was highly competitive and respected. Since then, we have embarked on countless reforms to make it relevant to the world of work and the knowledge economy. Have we succeeded?
The evidence from one critical sector says no: TVET. While enrolment at Senior High School and university levels has exploded, TVET remains small, weak, and fragmented. It has failed to respond to every major reform, even when those reforms acknowledged its central role in industrialisation and job creation.
To be fair, the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET) deserves credit for its recent policy bringing all TVET institutions under one umbrella and for pushing to upgrade workshops and introduce Competency-Based Training (CBT). I hope that this reform does not go the way of others.
CBT was introduced to solve a real problem: the skills mismatch between what schools teach and what employers need. The logic is simple and comes from human capital theory – if we train people directly for the competencies industry defines, they will become employable. It sounds perfect.
In practice, it is deeply problematic. To what extent has the knowledge factor been taken care of? On paper, it has been acknowledged. In Ghanaian policy documents, “knowledge and understanding” appears as a column in the unit specifications.
The National TVET Qualifications Framework (NTVETQF) Levels 3-5 now require some level of underpinning science and maths for progression to HND/Diploma. In reality, it has been systematically marginalised in design, delivery, and assessment.
To what extent has the knowledge factor been taken care of?
Traditional technical curricula were structured by subjects – Electrical Principles, Engineering Mathematics, Materials Science – taught as a coherent body of knowledge. Today’s CBT modules are structured by workplace tasks, e.g., “Install domestic wiring.”
The theory that used to be a discipline is now fragmented and squeezed into small “related knowledge” boxes inside each task. Students learn just enough theory to perform that specific task, not enough to understand the field.
The knowledge factor is present in rhetoric, but absent where it matters.
It is insightful to note that industry itself has many challenges keeping up with technological advancement. The skills and competencies required are in a continuous state of flux due to widespread digitisation, climate change and constant changes in work operations driven by technology upgrades.
If industry is struggling to keep up, how can a narrow, task-based curriculum prepare our youth for that future?
First, how CBT treats knowledge.
Everywhere CBT has been introduced, it has downplayed theoretical, disciplinary and abstract knowledge. It reduces learning to “what can you do” in a specific workplace context, and to generic skills like teamwork and communication. I argue this is dangerous. Theoretical knowledge is not a luxury.
It is what allows a worker to understand WHY a machine works, not just HOW to operate it. It is what allows an electrician to adapt when technology changes, an engineer to innovate, and a citizen to participate meaningfully in national debates. Without it, we are training people to be work-ready today but obsolete tomorrow.
Denying this “powerful knowledge” to TVET students – who already come from disadvantaged pathways – is socially unjust. Our data shows this clearly: while 95% of Ghanaian children enter basic school and 85% make it to Junior High, only 45% go to SHS, and a mere 3% find their way into TVET at that level. We are already pushing the majority away. Giving them a watered-down curriculum deepens that inequality.
Second, who defines what counts as skill?
In Ghana’s policy documents, skill is treated as a technical thing defined mainly by employers. But as French sociologist Mournier argued in his “Three Logics of Skills,” skill is a social and labour relation. It is shaped by history, institutions and power.
When we allow employers to have the final say in what goes into a CBT curriculum, the temptation is to narrow it to immediate, firm-specific tasks and strip out the broader theoretical knowledge that empowers workers to negotiate, to progress, and to change jobs.
We must bring educators and trade unions to the table as equal partners in defining occupational standards, as in the “sector skills” concept, and make it more effective.
There is another uncomfortable truth: formal public TVET provides less than 10% of the technical and vocational skills acquired in Ghana. The bulk is learned in the informal sector, where 90% of our economy operates. Any reform that ignores this reality will fail. Therefore, two things must happen together.
First, we must restore knowledge to the centre of the TVET curriculum. CBT should not mean no theory. We need competent graduates who also have the abstract, codified knowledge to navigate the labour market, adapt to new technologies and pursue further education. We should be building stronger pathways from School to TVET to Higher Education and work, not dead ends.
Second, skills policy alone will not create jobs. Government must do its part. The Asian Tigers did not industrialise through skills training alone. They created decent jobs, provided a stable policy environment, and invested massively in modern equipment and infrastructure to complement education.
In Ghana today, we are training people for jobs that do not exist, in workshops with obsolete equipment.
The World Bank and ILO have repeatedly warned that a weak TVET system will undermine Ghana’s industrialisation agenda.
They are right. Our current curriculum prepares students to be “work-ready” for a labour market that is largely informal, while denying them the very knowledge that defines a knowledge society. What a paradox.
Heaven can’t wait. But Heaven – by which I mean the Ghana we all desire: an industrialised, inclusive, and socially just economy where every young person has decent work, can innovate, question, and participate fully in our democracy – will have to wait if we continue to produce graduates who can perform a task but cannot question, innovate or debate.
We need a TVET system that does not just produce workers for today’s world of work, but citizens who can shape tomorrow’s.