The CEO of the Youth Employment Services, Ravi Naidoo, says South Africa is churning out skills certificates without any of them turning into real, sustainable jobs. At News24’s On the Record Summit he will push for linkages between the two.
South Africa’s post-school educational institutions are structured as certification factories, churning out many people with skills but no real jobs for them to apply those skills at.
“The approach we’ve taken in the country is to generate certificates. And the problem there is you can have as many certificates as you want, but if it doesn’t actually connect you to the workplace, it’s a waste of time,” Ravi Naidoo, the CEO of the Youth Employment Services, said.
Naidoo, who has decades of experience in policy creation, added that South Africa spent more than R150 billion annually on post-school education, “and whether we get a return on investment on that is very debatable”.
The pipeline is broken, and the focus needs to be firmly on the demand side.
“The vast majority of the unemployed have certificates, but it’s not resulting in a job,” Naidoo said.
This is what he hopes to deliver at News24’s On the Record Summit in March.
The summit aims to find workable solutions to the unemployment crisis and how to create five million jobs in 10 years.
Certificates do not equal jobs
He added that when he worked at the Human Resource Development Centre, he noticed how at least “90% of the people who came through vocational training schools had no jobs at the end of the training”.
Naidoo said:
“This is because there is no partnership between the private sector and these schools.”
“Take a person who has been trained to install solar panels,” he said. “They have theoretical knowledge of wiring and installations, but they have never actually worked on a solar panel.
“This makes them unemployable, because a company says to them, ‘it makes no difference if this person has a certificate or not, because I have to retrain them anyway’.”
Naidoo said that all the money spent on training then was just a waste “because they’re getting the certificates, but those certificates are not connected to the needs of the jobs available”.
He emphasised that this “practical work integration learning” missing link was important in specific sectors, like renewable energy, AI-related work, infrastructure and the automotive sector.
Naidoo called for the destination not to be a stack of certificates, but for training to lead to a pay cheque.
This is what he has driven at YES – a state-endorsed, private-sector funded youth employment programme.
YES collaborates with companies across various sectors to offer 12-month quality work experiences to unemployed young people.
Naidoo added that more than 70% of the people who went through this programme became permanently employed.
This is because the companies know the talent and skill set they are getting, as they monitor these young people for the whole year.
Nearly 2 000 businesses have partnered with YES to create critical youth jobs, and Naidoo said this created another opportunity to build that broken bridge.
By going to TVET colleges, they are saying:
“Let’s connect you to our corporate partners and see if we can increase the size of the pipe.”
This will help both companies and colleges.
For colleges, they can gain valuable feedback and insight into what skills and companies need now, and how these post-school training centres can take reforms in line with that.
For companies, they get a larger pool of quality youth talent and can save on extra training costs for new employees.
Naidoo asked:
“If you’re going to spend all that money training people, don’t you want to connect them to jobs?”
He added that this had not happened much in South Africa because, in practice, many of the post-school educators and organisers came from a training and theoretical background – with little practical knowledge about the current needs of a particular industry.
But for this model to scale up, it will not happen overnight. It took YES five years to put this model in place.
For the public sector, this would need to be done in stages. It would have to be what Naidoo calls a “radical incremental process”.
Build that bridge
One of the first steps that could be implemented across the board is to change the KPI’s of these training institutions to focus on the demand-side, instead of churning out certificates.
Instead, institutions should ask themselves: “How many people are going into actual jobs?”
Naidoo suggested that all the institutions should connect with a partner that had access to companies, because this was where the link in public-private partnerships had crucially broken down.
In March at the News24 summit, expect him to challenge the country’s muscle memory on the education-to-jobs pipeline, with fewer ceremonies and more job contracts.
The destination is not a stack of certificates – it’s a pay cheque. And the method is to build the bridge that reliably gets people from one to the other.
Find out more about the On the Record summit here.
If you are interested in attending the On the Record summit in-person, please contact us here.
Publisher: News24
Author: Muhammad Hussain
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