This report identifies a battery of workforce interventions supported by best international practices that can be deployed across priority agricultural and non-agricultural sectors of Georgia’s economy during EPI’s first year. The sectors targeted for workforce enhancement in 2011 are apparel, construction materials, transportation and logistics, wine tourism, blueberries, and agronomy. Additional recommendations continue these initiatives in year two and introduce others to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and other agricultural sectors. To realize these recommendations, CCID draws on a report by the director of the organization’s Georgian office that assesses the capacity of Georgian higher education and private training organizations to deliver needed education and training across the priority EPI sectors. The results of that report showed all of the PE and bachelor’s degree programs currently working in the EPI priority sectors and assessed the expertise, infrastructure, and other factors that affect the activities of specific PE centers, universities, and private training providers and suggest how they can be upgraded and supported by EPI to deliver new workforce programs and services.
Workforce initiatives in year one will include the following: CCID will start up new-worker and incumbent-worker trainings to serve Georgia’s growing apparel industry in Tbilisi and western Georgia. Sustainability of these initiatives is supported via the launch of teaching factories to be organized and managed by PE colleges in those regions. Learning materials adapted from these trainings will form the core of apparel specialties (programs) to be created for PE centers around Georgia. The other big initiative comprises three levels of training in wine education to be targeted on frontline hospitality staff working in Georgia’s international hotel and restaurant venues and in winery tasting rooms. Smaller initiatives, involving program consultation with U.S. workforce experts in the fields of transportation and logistics, construction materials, blueberries, and agronomy will result in the creation of additional PE programs and courses (subjects). Private training providers will also benefit from upgraded agricultural education training methods and training materials jointly created by Georgian and U.S. educational experts.