Above: UWI Professor Anthony Clayton

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Jamaica must increase investment in technology and highly-skilled areas to ensure the employability of the country’s future generations, according to University of the West Indies Professor Anthony Clayton.

“To a very considerable extent, our future depends on our ability to generate the skills that the market will be looking for,” said Clayton, who was speaking at the fourth annual Labour Market Forum at the Planning Institute of Jamaica in Kingston.

Clayton cited the example of the United States, where, in 1991, less than half of the jobs required skilled labour. By 2015, almost 75 percent of jobs in the US will require relatively advanced skills, however, he said.

Clayton, who is the Alcan Professor of Caribbean Sustainable Development at UWI, pointed to professions in areas like science, engineering and technology, along with logistics and policy analysis.

“We need people who are good at gathering information,” he said. “We have talked about how the world will become information-rich and you will be in a sea of information, but there is a very rare and important skill, which is making sense of it. People who have those skills and can disseminate that information are going to be extremely important.”