New Life Skills to Boost Innovation-Driven Economy
ITE has set about in a big way to revise its Employability Skills Curriculum, aligning it with the corporate theme of ‘Enterprise and Innovation@ ITE’. Besides inculcating the spirit of entrepreneurship, the revamp also gave renewed emphasis to National Education to help strengthen harmonious inter-ethnic ties. The fact that both are issues prevalent to current economic clime and social conditions bode well for relevance at ITE.

ITE Lecturers Go Regional
In March this year, a team of four Automotive Technology staff from the ITE West packed their bags and headed for Bangalore, India, to conduct a module in Vehicle Elementary Systems Training (VEST) for 50 software engineers from India’s Delphi Training Centre. Made possible through the assistance of ITE Education Services Pte Ltd, this ITE-Delphi collaboration aimed at elevating the competency of ITE lecturers to the level of regional trainers.

Setting Sights on Switzerland
Twelve Singaporean youths will be representing Singapore in the 37th World Skills Competition to be held in St Gallen, Switzerland in June 2003. The youths will be competing in a wide range of competition areas, from Information Technology to CNC Milling, from Graphic Design to Restaurant Service. The competitors were selected for their outstanding performance in the National Skills Competition held last year. Said Anthony Chong Tze Chen, 21, who will be taking part in Graphic Design: “Representing Singapore is a serious responsibility for me; it is also my once-in-a-lifetime chance to see how I fare against the rest of the world. I know I will be very much enriched by this experience.”

No More GST Woes
ITE’s Business Studies students can now look forward to using Smartledger, a simple and powerful desktop accounting solution, which not only caters to basic accounting functions that students need to learn but also comes with GST recording function which many accounting software in the market do not have. The software is made possible through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between ITE East (Bishan) and A2000 Solutions Pte Ltd on 30 May 2003.

Starting Over: No Loss, Only Gains
For the next couple of days after she was retrenched, former IT trainer, Kalaisylvie d/o Sadayappan felt devastated but the resilient lass recovered soon enough and did the next best thing - moved on. Moving on eventually led her to discover more of herself and her capabilities, thanks to the 160-hour ITE Skills Certificate (ITESC) in Residential Airconditioning programme, which she signed up in March this year. The full-time programme was one of the nine Skills Redevelopment Programme-Approved courses conducted at the Bukit Merah Skills Development Centre (BMSDC) and co-funded by the National Trades Union Congress and Skills Development Fund.