VTC can help implement ‘cost-effective, convenient national service plan’

AMMAN – The Vocational Training Corporation (VTC) can play a major role in a national service plan to replace the frozen military service and has suggestions for a practical scheme that would only cost a few millions a year, the agency’s acting director general, Omar Qteishat, has said.

In an interview at his office last week, Qteishat said that all ingredients for such a plan are at hand, especially since there is a network of partners that have been already cooperating in offering training programmes for youth for decades, including the Jordan Armed Forces-Arab Army, which splits with the VTC ownership of the National Employment and Training Company by 51-49 per cent. Other partners include the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Youth and Labour Ministry.

Qteishat made these remarks following Prime Minister Omar Razzaz recent statement that the government “must consider bringing back the military service”, during discussions with a House bloc, apparently in response to demands by lawmakers to reinstall the programme. 

The premier was quoted as saying that the goal behind reactivating the service, which has been frozen since the early 1990s, is “to contain youth”, adding that the programme would have a new format different than the old style.

According to Qteishat, a retired army colonel himself, demands for bringing back the draft for military service do not stop  at MPs, but they are rather a popular request “to toughen up youth”, among “countless benefits” of such a move. 

He suggested that, due to changes in circumstance, planners should steer away from designing a purely military service, suggesting a “national service” where the military plays the main role in training young people “not in army camps”, but in schools, VTC’s 43 facilities and youth camps run by the Youth Ministry. 

The duration should  change, he said, suggesting one year that includes military and fitness training for three months, an equal span for vocational training at the level of limited-skill labour and six months of field service at some location whenever the skills taught are needed. 

Qteishat said that there is no need for a sleepover at training camps, as trainees can be given a stipend for their transportation and pocket money. He explained that the total cost would be affordable, taking into consideration that the young people will be serving in places and save money for the state. 

Programmes like entrepreneurship and life skills can be infused into the training mix, in addition to lectures and discussions over issues of national concern to educate the youth, some of whom “hardly know anything about their country”. Awareness programmes would address issues like radicalism, Jordan’s history and stands, development and others. 

There are unlimited options for how to utilise the young force during the six-month actual service, the VTC chief said. Serving in national projects such as development of remote areas, forestation, helping government agencies with the skills they learn and even working at private-sector projects for extra wages in sectors in dire need for certain skills.

“We are talking all the time about replacing guest labour with local workforce. What is a better way than a mandatory national service where the worker is a soldier serving his country and himself?” Qteishat said, noting that the national service would over the years open thousands of permanent and temporary jobs for retired army, police and civil service pensioners, who will be helping in training, along with lecturers, supervisors and vocational training coaches.

The VTC director noted that his corporation has a smaller-scale precedent that it has been applying for more than a decade, involving fitness training and awareness lectures for its trainees across the Kingdom for a month every year. Army, police and civil defence personnel provide the training that has targeted so far more than 17,000 young men, while around 4,000 women have received some sort of training under the programme.