Firm takes on students

 By TED WIKA KALEO

PAPUA New Guinea Power Ltd (PPL) is rolling out its ongoing graduate development and apprenticeship programmes reintroduced last year to replace its aging workforce and maintain competitive workforce within the organisation.

The programmes were first started in during the PNG Electricity Commission (ELCOM) days and were ignored in 2007 due to problems of management restructures and pending organisational restructures.

Senior training and human resources manager, Arnold Harriman said the new PPL management had seen the need to reintroduce the programmes to look at its infrastructures, human resources and the systems within the organisation to help improve the way PPL conducted its business.

“In order for PPL to move on, we look at our organisation. We lack capacity. Our technical staff are aging and we lost technical knowledge as the programmes were dropped,” he said.

“We are reintroducing these two programmes in order to train more people to succeed those aging workers who would soon be leaving the company. Our aim is to transform PPL and move it from where it is now to the next level.

“We believe in skilled workforce to be able to transfer reliable services to our valuable customers in the country.” 

Harriman said PPL would be looking at taking on board 70 people for the two programmes.

He said over 50 applicants would be taken under the apprenticeship programme and the other 20 would be for the graduate development programme.

He said those accepted under the graduate development programme would do the general induction programmes based on their qualifications.

“We will train successful applicants and retain some of them in the organisation. Some will be sent to other organisations to help contribute to the country’s development.”