Student Focus endeavours to provide a platform for all involved in the training, lecturing and mentoring of South African food science students. After all, they are the future of the food industry. However, Roxanne Rolando never thought it would receive such an enormous response.
Student debate
In the last issues of Food Review Roxanne Rolando, undercover student liaison, struck a lot of hot debate in an article entitled Propelling the professionalism of the food industry. Dr Gunnar Sigge, head of the Food Science Department at the University of Stellenbosch, responded to the article in the March issue of Food Review. Well, the debate continues. Shortly afterwards we received a letter from Michael Davies:
Hi Roxanne,
My goals for highlighting this debate are twofold: namely to enable graduates to assimilate quicker into a world of work, that reflects their interests, their personality and their talents and, secondly, to ensure that the organisation that recruits them provides occupational and contextual knowledge and skills, relevant experience and access to coaches and mentors that are interested in the development of these graduates. It is my belief that to achieve this many stakeholders need to work together to provide an environment that enables occupational and career enrichment to occur.
My vision is that employers, SAAFoST and higher education institutions aim to provide this as well as a lifelong nurturing environment. I am well aware that higher education institutions have many constraints, too many to mention here, my hope however, is that they are not constrained by an unwillingness to be agile and to rather be flexible and adapt to the changing economic environment or to be hindered by a culture of competition rather than collaboration and are rather focused on the needs and aspirations of the customer rather than the academic.
My feeling is that if we are all focussed on the learner/graduate then speed to competence, once employed, and occupational and contextual relevance will be a priority. I stress that I speak in my personal capacity, as person who has a 28 year of educational experience, who has been a senior manager in a higher education institution and who continually defends higher education institution’s in employee forums.
My only wish is to empower learners and strengthen food science and food technology as occupations rather than qualifications.
Kind regards
Mike
Student guidance
In the February issue of Food Review an interview with Liana Koopman, human resources officer from Orley Foods, and graduate-Katlego Lebelo, called Student orientation was published. It highlighted the purposes of in-service training for the food science student. Food Review received this response.
Dear Roxanne,
Thank you to you and Food Review for punting the profession and the students we produce nationally in the article referred to above.
However, I wish to raise a note of concern about a part where Ms Katlego Lebelo is quoted as follows: ‘I want to work in a food company as a food technologist...’
I and my colleagues in the Department of Food Technology at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) as well as other academics involved in training food technologists and food scientists have often come across this ‘cross-over’ of fields of training in the minds and eyes of graduates and, very often, industry. A similar situation exists with qualifications in consumer science and its equivalents at university level.
Our contention is that, in actual fact, a food technology qualification trains a student to do quite a different job to the other qualifications referred to previously. Admittedly, there are greater and lesser degrees of overlap, but very often not sufficient to make an assumption that they are so similar that is it would be easy to employ one qualification and get the same service as you would from a food technologist.
Employers make decisions on placing persons based on this misconception and then do not end up with what they thought they were getting. This confusion is partly due to employer ignorance and also partly due to the way different types of graduates either sell themselves, or are sold, to industry.
These differences need to be clarified in order for each graduate to assume his or her proper place in industry with both employer and employee benefitting from such a relationship.
At the end of the day though, Ms Lebelo is still well within her rights to seek employment in the field of her choice. However, a word of caution needs to be sounded to ensure industry ‘gets what it wants’, since anything to the contrary could sour existing relationships between all parties concerned.
Kind regards
Larry Dolley
Manager: Agrifood Technology Station
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Reply
Food Review would like to thank everyone for their keen interest. Please do not stop corresponding with us and feel free to send us a letter anytime with any developments concerning the future of the food industry.
To correspond with Roxanne email her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
