Employment minister Michael Myles has suggested focusing scholarship programmes on key career pathways to better connect Caymanians with local jobs.
“Our returning investment on scholarships has been flat because our youngsters are coming home from school and they’re fighting to get jobs,” he told Cayman Independent.
Much of that issue, Myles said, comes down to overreliance on work permits, rather than investing in Caymanian talent and training. Another issue comes down to skills matching.
Myles, minister responsible for Caymanian employment and immigration, estimated that about 1,500 young people are studying through scholarships from the Cayman Islands Government.
He said the study programmes chosen by scholarship recipients, however, are often misaligned with the islands’ needs.
“We don’t say to them, ‘Okay, the scholarship that you get, we would like for you to pursue one of five of these career paths, because this is in demand in our country’,” he said.
“What we’re allowing people to do is just basically go off and study what they want. I’ve seen a lot of youngsters and what they’re studying doesn’t actually transition back into the country.”
He lamented Caymanians studying careers like marketing, which he said provide little opportunity locally.
“Marketing professionals – the Cayman Islands doesn’t have a major market to host the volume of persons working within that field.
“If you want to do that, you need to stay in the US or go to Canada or stay in Europe.”
He said education minister Rolston Anglin is working to define Cayman’s top five career areas, in an effort to better focus scholarship funding.
Myles identified accounting, teaching and social services as promising fields for young Caymanians to pursue.
“We have a lot of foreigners who come in for accounting because there’s a shortage worldwide, but we don’t have a lot of Caymanian accountants,” he said.
He also identified the trades – automotive, plumbing, electrical and HVAC – as stable pathways in the era of AI advancement.
“These are the jobs that AI is never going to take over,” he said.
Regarding previously announced plans to develop a national workforce database, Myles mentioned JobsCayman as an option to advance the proposal.
“If that’s going to be the database, that’s great, but we need to ensure that we invest more funds in it to make it more efficient and more flexible,” he said.
The government has suggested the database concept as part of larger immigration reforms, to better align workforce opportunities and educational investment.
