Chris Vassallo Cesareo, CEO of furniture manufacturer and retailer Domestica, is on a mission to revive the Maltese flair for carpentry, arguing that the skill and quality of locals’ work deserves greater prestige and recognition.

“The Maltese are good craftsmen,” he tells WhosWho.mt, “and we should be proud of it.”

Mr Vassallo Cesareo believes that there is a “fear of working in furniture” among young people, and has invested his own time and resources to help them overcome it.

In an initiative he started through The Malta Chamber, where he has been a Council Member since 2013 and currently serves as Deputy President, he reached out to MCAST to, in is words, “put my money where my mouth is”, entering discussions to restructure the technical college’s carpentry course.

He stresses that the effort was welcomed wholeheartedly by other furniture companies, several of which collaborated in the initiative.

“We were looking at reviving Maltese carpentry,” he says. “Through our discussions with MCAST there was a realignment of what the current industry trends are, allowing the course to be further adapted to today’s requirements.”

Nowadays, furniture production is a complex process that involves the use of highly sophisticated machinery and the input of a wide array of professionals, from designers to architects, he points out.

Seeing a gap between what students were taught and what was actually required on the job, Mr Vassallo Cesareo’s initiative aimed to refresh the carpentry course to bring it in line with industry needs.

Key to this effort was the central positioning of apprenticeships providing crucial on-the-job training – a task which has achieved considerable success, with manufacturers seeing an appreciable increase in the work-readiness of new graduates.

The collaboration of industry and academia allows both to benefit, with students granted access to state of the art technology through their apprenticeships.

“We cannot expect the educational sector to be up to date with all the latest machinery – the cost would be prohibitive,” he says. “By teaming up with producers – who need to have that machinery to remain competitive in an evolving market – the educational sector can use our equipment to teach students.”

For the Domestica CEO, the benefits go beyond producers’ bottom line.

“It’s about respecting the wonderful abilities people have and not reducing their worth and economic potential to a qualification stuck on the way,” he says, explaining his conviction that ‘O’ Levels are “a deeply unfair way to assess a person’s capabilities”.

He points out that the lack of any formal qualifications obtained by a number of his employees does not prevent them from being highly skilled craftsmen, and argues that “it’s really narrow-minded to judge a person by a degree hanging on the wall.”

“I would never dream of producing something like them, and I admire them for it.”