The Cape Coast Technical University and the University of Cape Coast have signed an MoU with Cend Power, an Argentine engineering company based in Ghana, to offer industrial training to engineering students in both universities.

This is to ensure that engineering students in both universities acquire hands-on skills and training before completing their programmes of study.

At a short signing ceremony at the Cape Coast Technical University, the Plant General Manager of CENDPOWER, Julio Gomez, explained that the future of every nation rested on its engineers, hence the need for them to be given a solid foundation.

He stated that collaborations between academic institutions and industry over the years have not yielded many results because either the industry players were not offering such opportunities to the students or the academic institutions were not being proactive in partnering with industry for such opportunities for their students.

"Technological and engineering education have been found to be the pivot around which the growth of a country hinges. In today’s world, a country that does not have technical support will always lag behind.

"It is for this reason that the partnership between these institutions is laudable and goes to explain how technical universities have been repositioned and oriented to focus on their core mandate by producing future engineers and a technically minded workforce, "he stated.

At the signing ceremony, Professor Joshua Danso Owusu-Sekyere, indicated the agreement adds loads of experience to the school’s human resource capital as the students would no longer be graduating without having had some engagement with industry.

He states that it has become almost mandatory for every student that graduates from the institution to go through such an experience under the new arrangement.

He further stated, “It will sharpen their skills and provide a little more knowledge to enable them to fare better when they graduate from school. And we think this is a good collaboration for which reason we have signed the MoU.”

He further added that over the years, they’ve been training people who have no real industrial experience, and when they graduate and go out, they’re not fit for purpose; they have to be retrained.

“But with the current arrangements, the students would acquire some skills before they graduate and so, after school, it doesn’t matter where you send them, they get there and they are almost ready to start work,” he explained.

He added that it’s not only the students that would benefit under the MoU but the lecturers as well. He was hopeful that their lecturers would be exposed to an industrial experience that would propel them to incorporate what they learned in the field at the industrial level into the theory they already knew.

He ended by saying that it would "enrich their lecture notes to enable them to deliver effectively."

The Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Cape Coast, Prof. Sarah Darkwah, signed on behalf of UCC while the Vice-Chancellor of the Cape Coast Technical University, Prof. Joshua Danso Owusu-Sekyere, signed on behalf of CCTU.