At the HEART College of Beauty Services, the trainees are not only learning to do makeup, they are more knowledgeable about the components of the beauty products. Additionally, the HEART College of Construction Services is turning out highly skilled graduates, who are not only workforce-ready but ready to start their own businesses”, said Dr Ingleton. In the near to medium term, Dr Ingleton is on a mission to lead the transformation of HEART/NSTA as a national resource with the capacity to interface at all levels with the education and training system, and to embrace the varied skills and experience of retiring members of the workforce as volunteers and mentors in the national training system. “We are not just for the unattached and the underserved. We exist to serve the entire Jamaica” is her compelling conviction as HEART at 40, rallies to be the next best edition of itself. Dr Taneisha Ingleton assumed the helm of the HEART/NSTA Trust on the first of August 2022 with a passionate vision of how the Organisation should reinvent itself to serve the country in the next five years. “Thesamewayalmost every Jamaican would have gone through basic, primary and secondary education, I want every single Jamaican to learn a skill in whatever area that we have to offer”, said Dr Ingleton. “I want Jamaicans to be telling us the kind of skill theywant, andwe provide the training to get them there…I want us to create a system where the entire population feeds through HEART”, remarked Dr Ingleton. Dr Ingleton has been motivating and mobilising the HEART team around her dreams for the Organisation, while listening closely to the requests from employers for trainees with more employability skills to enhance their performance in the workplace. HEART/NSTA is now redoubling efforts to seamlessly integrate employability skills training in all programmes, “no longer as an appendage but seamlessly written into the curriculum” she insisted. “So, the student who is coming out, will not only be technically skilled, technically competent, but will communicate better, HEART graduates will have the cultural awareness skills to know how to refer to their employers and customers, and how to show up for work on time and behave on the job”, she added. The new HEART Managing Director maintains that HEART/NSTA must be in a state of continuous improvement in the things it does well, directing that the research and advocacy capabilities activities of the Agency be expanded, and that TVET research findings be published and shared with the tertiary institutions She has already taken steps to strengthen HEART/NSTA’s capacity to deliver a robust Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) curriculum, and to publicize the examples of research innovation in theHEART training delivery system. “The trainees at Ebony Park in Toll Gate are doing a lot of research in tissue culture and inter-breeding, and other areas in agriculture; we're producing a different type of graduate for the market. “We Exist to Serve the Entire Jamaica. We Want to Touch Every Single Jamaican!” - Dr Taneisha Ingleton, Managing Director, HEART/NSTA “I want every single Jamaican to learn a skill in whatever area that we have to offer” 21
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