Leather Sector Offers Scholarship Opportunities to Young People

The leather industry is preparing to provide scholarships to high-achieving students who choose leather engineering in the 2021/22 academic year, with amounts reaching the minimum wage, to ensure the sector has more qualified leather engineers. The leather sector needs at least 25 leather engineers annually, according to Erkan Zandar, Chairman of the Aegean Leather and Leather Products Exporters Association, who continued his remarks as follows: "For this reason, as a sector we have decided to provide scholarships to high-achieving young people if they choose leather engineering. As the Aegean Leather and Leather Products Exporters Association (EDMİB) and Istanbul Leather and Leather Products Exporters Association (İDMİB), we signed a protocol with the Higher Education Council (YÖK) in 2019 to elevate the perception of leather engineering to higher levels and encourage more students to choose these departments. In the first year we launched the project in 2019, 12 students received scholarship entitlements. We should reach higher figures in the coming period." Zandar emphasized that there is a serious shortage of engineers in the sector, and therefore qualified graduates from the department will have no trouble finding employment. "Under our scholarship project, we will provide young people ranking in the top 20,000 in the university entrance examination with scholarships equivalent to the minimum wage, those ranking between 20,000-60,000 with 70% of the minimum wage, and those ranking between 60,000-100,000 with 50% of the minimum wage. The only department in Turkey offering leather engineering education is the Leather Engineering Department at Ege University Faculty of Engineering. We are confident that our project will meet our sector's need for trained personnel and will reveal our sector's true potential. Our students will have guaranteed job placement in the sector upon graduation as a result of the academy-industry cooperation established through this protocol." "With a 29% increase in 2021, we achieved TRY 1.7 billion in exports, and with qualified human resources, we can increase this to TRY 3 billion in the medium term. Together with our Board of Directors, given that the leather sector is one of the labor-intensive sectors, we attach great importance to our project with the motivation of ensuring employment of qualified labor and increasing the sector's human capital. We invested considerable effort in promoting the project this year. Billboards were leased and the project was promoted in Izmir, Aydın, Uşak and Manisa provinces," he stated.