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Experts in the education and industry sectors have met in Accra to brainstorm on how the two could be strengthened to link up with each other to address the teething unemployment challenges confronting the country. Ghana has, over the years, not managed to create the needed link between education and training on one hand, and industry on the other. Emerging trends in the global economy are making the situation more complex, as it pertains to other economies as well. National policies to produce graduates at all levels with the right mix of skills to meet the demands of industry, and the general world of work, appears compounded by Ghana�s rising population. Experts say the problem of supply/demand gaps in education, and skills training output in Ghana, has been partly blamed for the problem of unemployment and the high incidence of joblessness. The National Development Planning Commission, in its 2010 report, identified weak linkage between tertiary education and education as a major cause of emerging graduate unemployment in the country. To curtail this, the two-day national conference, under the theme, �Achieving a strong partnership between education/training and industry: the way forward�, is expected to make valuable recommendations, which will serve as a blueprint in guiding the government�s future interventions in this regard. The event seeks to solicit ideas from the relevant stakeholders to address emerging unemployment, through well-thought sustainable solutions; establish on-going debates on the respective roles of education and industry in the development of human capital formation; examine existing proposals in a bid to practically harmonise them for the desired result; and make recommendations to ensure that education/training produce citizens with employable skills. It drew participants from the Presidency, including the President, John Dramani Mahama, members of the Council of State, ministers, senior government officials, parliamentarians, members from the National Development Planning Commission, representatives of the business community, think-thanks, civil society organisations, members of the tertiary education sector, including vice-chancellors of universities, chairpersons of University Councils, rectors of polytechnics, and principals of Colleges of Education, representatives of lectures and students, Trade Union Congress, Association of Ghana Industries, Ghana Employers Association, the informal sector, representatives of registered political parties, the media, and development partners. Industry should be a partner of education President John Dramani Mahama, who opened the event, in his remarks, bemoaned the wide gap between education and industry. He said for the country to move forward, it was important for industry to be a partner of education in order to identify what the job market requires from the latter. According to the President, the unfortunate result of not having an alignment of educational training to industry and business was that several organisations and corporate entities put in requests for expatriate quotas to bring in foreign specialists, when they could not find those skills in the local market. �So, there is a great deal at stake, and we must re-double our efforts to ensure that we are producing graduates in the areas that the world of work is demanding them. Industry and business must let us know the skills they require, and which areas of training they require these, so that our institutions of learning can align their curricular to suit this demand,� he averred. He said industry should be in a position to offer benchmarks during the design implementations and evaluation of the education curricular. To that end, he urged players in the industrial sector to offer active and mutually beneficial support to the educational sector. �Industry and education need to become strong partners, working together effectively to help us achieve rapid and sustainable national development. They must work hand-in-hand, and open doors for a closer partnership that is mutually beneficial,� noted President Mahama. He said the ideas generated from the conference would inform a joint education and industry collaboration, aimed at using high level link to address technically challenged strategies. The Chief Executive Officer of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), Seth Twum Akwaboah, on his part, noted that the collaboration of industry and education was critical for economic growth and the competitiveness of the country. �This collaboration, in my opinion, must be built in a tripartite structure of key stakeholders � government, academia and industry to general appropriate synergies � in order to bridge the gap between industry and academia,� he noted. He said the AGI had, over the years, noticed the growing mismatch between what industry expects from job seekers, and what they could really do. According to him, industry expects, from job seekers, multiple skills, professionally functional and results-oriented among others. These deficiencies in many of our school leavers have become a major setback with graduate employment. According to the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) report on the state of the economy, 2011, 50% of university graduates remained unemployed for at least two years, before getting their first pay check. �This is indeed worrying,� he said. According to him, as a measure to curtail the anomaly, there came the introduction of industrial attachment, but argued that such a measure had proved to be a burden onto the students, who had to �spend more time searching for industrial attachment, only for the period to elapse.� Commenting further, Mr. Akwaboah proposed to the government to consider a well coordinated programme for the attachment system, such as that of the national service, to address the difficulties students had to endure. �Above all, government must support industry to grow to absorb the huge numbers that are being churned out from the universities. Between 2012 and 2013, the growth rate of industry�s contribution to GDP declined from 11% to 7%, and manufacturing in particular, from 2% to 0.6%. Absorbing these students for the industrial sector, therefore, becomes a big challenge. Industry-academia relationship, indeed, thrives on a growing industry, and, therefore, we need to push the industrial sector to enable it absorb more of these students,� he noted. The Minister for Education, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, commenting on the event, said the forum was meant to create the context for understanding and collaboration between the trainers and the users of the train. According to her, apart from fulfilling requirements of the education strategic plan of 2010-2020, the conference was also geared towards addressing concerns about the employability of the product of the country�s education system, through well thought sustainable solutions, by engaging with all relevant stakeholders. She proposed that the forum be held annually, but noted that was subject to the recommendations after the event.