Developing job path at early age vital

Identifying career pathways and talented children at an early age and helping them to develop their interest and talent is seen as an important concept to include in the current education curriculum.
This was a proposed concept by Sabina Mong, director of research and innovation at the Education Department and founder of the PNG Career Guide Centre.
“The general education school system’s curriculum design needs to conceive, develop and nurture a child-friendly system that would prepare them in their interest of field and career from early childhood through to grade 12,” Mong said.
“We want to identify our engineers, lawyers, pilots, sports persons, scientist, etc… at an early age and focus our learning subjects around developing their career.”
She said the country’s education system was not meeting the international standard as our curriculum was based on preparing students for examinations alone and not on assessment and monitoring to meet standards.
“With assessment, there can be proper monitoring and evaluation of policies to identify performances and compare standards and policy implementation,” she said.
“With the appropriate data we will know where we are in terms of our education standard and what the government can do to improve it.”
Mong said one way of identifying these careers was for students to sit for the career talent identification assessment test in primary school, grade eight and grade 10.
She said their results and database will be collected and their careers identified. They will then be monitored for assessment and teaching purposes, unlike the current curriculum where students wait till grade 11 to sit for their differential aptitude test to find out where they are good at.
The Kopkop College, a private school which enrols children from kindergarten to grade 12, in Port Moresby would be the first to trial this new concept.