A training course to help contractors and artisans price their products effectively began at H. Lavity Soutt Community College Monday, an effort sponsored by the Caribbean Development Bank. The weeklong Computerised Job Estimation Tools workshop is designed to teach participants to use a computer programme that will enable them to price their jobs more accurately. Communications and Works Minister Mark Vanterpool said at the opening that he hopes the course will help attendees participate in an anticipated wave of public and private sector projects.
“Artisans and contractors must be able to understand how to compete for major contracts, whether as consortiums or as subcontractors,” he said. “In order for this to happen, you must keep upgrading your skills; you must learn how to cost projects; you must learn how to bid for projects; you must understand, for example, what the Caribbean Development Bank, CDB, as major financiers, expect from governments and contractors affiliated with their projects.”
The minister also affirmed his government’s commitment to completing works with petty contracts, which typically have a value of less than $100,000 and are handed out at a minister’s discretion.
“We do not want to have to confine the bulk of the work to only the larger contractors,” he said. “I would also want to encourage the bigger contractors, who can more readily avail themselves of the larger projects, to subcontract some of this work to smaller contractors and tradesmen.”
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