THE MAYOR of Mae Sot Municipality has said it will be necessary to develop human resources and trade simultaneously in Tak province, now a designated special economic zone

“Changes are happening now. We have to make preparations,” Mayor Terdkiat Chinsoranan said at a seminar discussing how to prepare labour for Mae Sot district’s burgeoning economy.

According to Tak Deputy Governor Sutta Saiwanich, the Mae Sot area is a major trading post connecting the region’s east and west.

Terdkiat said he expected trade volumes in his area to rise from Bt80 billion a year to Bt100 billion in the near future. He said investors from several countries, particularly South Korea, had already expressed interest in investing in the province, “so we need to prepare both infrastructure and human resources”.

At the same seminar, Mae Sot Technical College deputy director Yodpetch Praenoi said the government hoped to increase the number of vocational graduates but had not provided an adequate budget for the vocational-education sector.

“My college gets a budget of Bt8,500 to hire an additional teacher per month. But how can we recruit such a teacher given that a person with proper qualifications will get at least Bt15,000 a month elsewhere?” he said, adding that the budget for equipment was inadequate, which caused problems.

Wittaya Manterm, another deputy director at the same institute, said vocational education required specialised equipment for teaching and learning. “We can’t use just paper,” he said.

He said old technology and tools would not suffice because graduates had to be prepared to enter real working environments.

Somsak Kaweerat, from the Tak Chamber of Commerce, said people needed determination to adapt and prove they were up to the job, including improving their linguistic skills. “I have found out that Karen children at evacuation centres can speak four to five languages. But Thai children are fluent in only Thai,” he added.

Quality Learning Foundation (QLF) executive assistant manager Patanapong Sukmadan cited the latest survey on the Thai human capital index, which stated that Thailand must equip students and workers in labour-intensive sectors with essential skills.

It also stated that people in vocational education would be key to the country’s future because they would be main human resource for economic development.

“It’s necessary to boost vocational students’ skills including language. If we don’t start now, more Thai youths will be unemployed. The gap between formal and vocational education must be narrowed and the formal-education students must learn necessary vocational skills.”

2m workers over 5 years

Patanapong said the QLF and the Office of Basic Education Commission had organised vocational education programmes in 10 pilot provinces to support education reform and prepare the country’s labour force in line with Thailand 4.0 industrial strategy and area-based education reform.

Thailand will need to add as many as 2 million vocational skilled labourers in five years, the QLF study found.

Patanapong said Tak required 4,140 skilled workers added per year but could produce only 1,656, so provincial officials aimed to increase vocational-skilled manpower by 45 per cent in the future.