TSC Lists High-Demand Teaching Areas Offering More Job Opportunities

Students set to join university this September are being urged by the Teachers Service Commission, TSC, to think twice before settling on their course choices, especially if they can be persuaded to pick subjects where Kenya is desperately short of teachers.

TSC Chairperson Jamleck Muturi appealed on Tuesday while addressing the Kenya Music Festival Gala in Bungoma County, singling out music, creative arts, home science, woodwork and metalwork as fields where classrooms across the country are struggling to find qualified staff.

“Allow me to inform the country that we have a very serious shortage of teachers in the following areas: music, creative arts, home science, woodwork, metalwork, and quite a number of those areas,” he told the gathering.

Muturi went further, suggesting that even students who have already been admitted to university this year still have room to pivot.

“I want to inform the universities that as students join universities in September, those are the areas you can consider telling them to switch to, by changing their admission courses. We do not have teachers in those areas,” he said.

With the Competency-Based Curriculum having widened the range of subjects schools are expected to teach, gaps in specialist areas like the arts and technical subjects have become harder to ignore.

Muturi’s comments give tens of thousands of students still weighing their options and universities themselves a fairly direct nudge on where the job prospects actually lie.

The TSC chair used the platform to update serving teachers on a matter that’s been simmering for a while: promotions.

According to Muturi, the commission is preparing to promote 34,016 teachers in the coming weeks, and those working in the very subject areas facing shortages will be among those considered.

“Once I get proper information from the ministry and the chair, we will consider you,” he said, responding to teachers who have been pushing for clarity on stalled career progression.

That promise builds on an agreement TSC signed with the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET) back in June, designed to cut through the red tape that has long slowed down promotions.

The deal traces back to the Collective Bargaining Agreement the two sides struck in July last year, and it’s meant to make the appointment process considerably less painful for teachers who qualify.

Muturi explained that the reforms didn’t come out of nowhere; they’re the product of roughly a year of back-and-forth between the commission and teachers’ unions, aimed squarely at fixing the Career Progression Guidelines that have governed promotions since 2018.

“For the last year, we have been engaging with the unions, based on the signed CBA that we did in July last year. One of the issues that we have been looking at is the review of the career progression guideline for teachers,” he said.

Taken together, Tuesday’s remarks put two very different groups on notice: students about to make one of the bigger decisions of their academic lives, and teachers who’ve been waiting to see whether promised reforms will actually translate into faster promotions.

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