An open letter to the THA Secretary of Community Development—

The Division of Community Development recently took to social media, patting itself on the back for a sensitisation workshop for vocational tutors. They stood behind a list of Level 2 courses in masonry, electrical, plumbing, and called it Raising the Bar.

To the Secretary and the architects of this plan: if you truly believe a 2026 economy can be built on the back of 1980s manual labour alone, you are out of touch. What you are calling progress is actually a formal, certified regression. You are not raising the bar; you are simply painting a rusty old ceiling and hoping we don’t notice the house is falling down.

The “local-only” loop

It takes a staggering lack of vision to witness a global technological revolution and respond with a Level 1 course in videography.

Manual labour skills like masonry and basic plumbing are non-tradeable services. Every country in the world already has masons; you cannot export a bricklayer to London or Singapore from a desk in Scarborough.

These skills are capped by the local market’s ability to pay, which continues to face stagnation.

By contrast, the global digital economy is projected to reach US$28 trillion by the end of 2026.

High-end digital services are growing three times faster than the rest of the world economy. While you are busy sensitising tutors on how to lay tile, the rest of the world is hiring:

• Cybersecurity specialist engineers (to protect global infrastructure)

• Web engineer specialists (to build the platforms of the future)

• Cloud technician specialists (to manage the US$600 billion cloud market)

• Computing and AI systems technicians (to drive the next industrial revolution).

The economic math: exporting brains vs breaking backs

Let’s look at the data that is not reflected in current policy. Research shows individuals with advanced digital skills see an annual earnings uplift of nearly 20% compared to general roles.

More importantly, these are exportable skills. A cloud technician in Tobago can earn foreign exchange by servicing a firm in Dubai without ever leaving their home. This is digital residency—a strategy that brings foreign currency directly into our local grocery stores and businesses without requiring a single barrel of oil.

By refusing to inculcate these high-tier skills, the approach risks limiting economic opportunities for our youth. This approach prioritises skills that every other country already has, making it significantly harder for them to compete globally.

You are preparing them for a skills ceiling that forces our brightest minds to leave. This is why we have a brain drain. Our youth see a system that values the physical repair over the digital build.

The missing mirror:

a policy blind spot

The fundamental defect here is the total absence of skill mirroring. Every manual trade today has a digital twin that carries ten times the economic value. If the leadership could look past the next election cycle, they would see:

• The Electrical mirror: Level 2 Electrical is useless without AI Electrical Engineering or Smart Grid Management.

• The Construction mirror: Masonry is a dead end without 3D Construction Modelling or Sustainable Materials Engineering.

A call for a high-tier revolution

Secretary, aligning “instructional documents” is not leadership. It is paperwork.

True leadership would be an MoU that brings global tech certifications such as AWS, Google, Microsoft and CompTIA into our community centres.

It would mean producing database administrators and cybersecurity experts who can command international salaries from a laptop in Roxborough.

We need a curriculum that mirrors the physical with the digital. Without high-end specialists, you are not building an economy; you are managing a museum of obsolete skills.

The verdict

The current vocational cycle is a missed opportunity of tragic proportions, which suggests a gap in alignment with global digital trends.

To the public: do not be fooled by the Level 2 labels. Until we see a launch that includes the high-end digital tier, we are simply being taught how to maintain a world that is already gone.

The offices are empty because the intelligence required to fill them is being ignored by the very people we pay to lead.

Stop recycling the past. Start engineering the future.

Jason Clarke



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