The University of Namibia (UNAM) hosted the Redefining Education Summit, which aims to transform higher education into skills-based and innovative learning.

The initiative comes at a time when discussions around transformation, innovation, and skill development in higher education are gaining momentum in Namibia.

A member of the national task force in the Ministry of Higher Education, Henny Seibeb, has encouraged students to study technical fields besides getting university degrees to be well-equipped.

"When you go and do welding under the sea, when the ship is there, you have to go and dive in and do welding, one of the most difficult traits, but it's making money, and I always ask youth to go for it. Besides a university degree, go for a technical field also, and then you will be well-equipped. The other one is job seeker mentality; it is a structured product, not a personal deficiency."

Seibeb further stressed that the job-seeking mentality needs to be dismantled.

"When I was in parliament, we took the position that we need to promote TVET. At the continental level, there is an African continental strategy, 2025 to 2035."

A teacher and UNAM alumnus, Cedrik Chabola, said that statistics revealed that there are more education graduates who are unemployed than in any other field.

"Subject pairing has killed most of our graduates, and some of this we can't blame the graduates for, but the University of Namibia is fully aware of these challenges. So this is one of the reasons why we have high unemployment within the education fraternity."

During his presentation, Dr. Tadeus Shikukumwa in the Department of Applied Education Sciences also noted that qualified graduates currently waiting for government absorption into the teaching profession or other job opportunities are at 36.9% to 40%.

He further stressed that there is a mismatch between training and market demands.

"That is what has contributed to the higher rate of unemployment in a country. What is the bottleneck that we are talking about here now? The bottleneck is dependency, relying on the Ministry of Education for employment research."