EOH Work Readiness Initiative - Narrative Reports 2014 - 2015 Aug. 2014 | Page 34

WORK READINESS INITIATIVE UNDER DIGITAL JOBS FOR AFRICA

MANAGERS & MENTORS
GENEVIEVE HUMAN (TEAM LEADER)
Genevieve’s learners are on an End-User Computing
Learnership. Her team is busy supporting a paperless
drive by her employer’s HR department. This involves
receiving boxes of employee records, preparing them
for scanning, scanning, storing and electronically and
archiving the re-boxed physical records.
Ten learners are helping her and making the work go
much faster. Genevieve experienced the quality of work
from the learners before the EOH Work Readiness
Programme, and afterwards, and is thus able to provide
a qualified before-and-after perspective.
Makgotso (Vinolia) Leshaba whose interview appears in
this report, is under Genevieve’s supervision.
Genevieve you were here before the work readiness
programme and afterwards. Did you notice an
improvement?
“A lot hey. Before they went through to Seibeng there
was a lot of fighting amongst them, they didn’t do their
work, they always quarreled amongst each other. But
when they came back there was a big difference. The
dress codes as well. There is a lot that changed. In the
beginning it was each one for himself. But after they
came back they started working together, speaking to
each other if they don’t understand something. So team
work does play a big role in it.”
Its always quite hard to have learners in a workplace.
What would you say to another team leader that is having
learnership candidates or new learners in the workplace.
What would you say to them as advice?
“Before [the learners] come [to the workplace] they really
need to go to the [work readiness] training they went on,
because when they went to Sedibeng for this training,
when they came back there was a huge difference.
Before [the learners] come out to the workplace they
need to go through this process to make them ready for
everything.”
Do you find that a lot of your time has to be spent
supporting the learners?
“In the beginning it was like that but now not at all. They
ask each others questions, they communicate with each
other. And at first they all used to come to me and I used
to help them, but after everything they deal with each
other. When they are unsure of something then they will
come to me and ask me.”

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JAUN RUST (MANAGER)
Jaun (pronounced as in the French Juan), is the manager
for 19 learners placed with EOH Managed Services,
a division of EOH Abantu (Pty) Ltd. He is the Regional
Manager for Gauteng in their Field Support Services,
which has 187 employees nationally. He is responsible
for providing on-site IT support to contractual clients
after their service desk has first attempted to resolve the
issue remotely. This includes looking after the day to day
operations of call handling, incident handling, resource
management and customer satisfaction.
Customer orientation and IT skills sets are the key
success factors he looks for in his employees. Exposing
learners to the “how” of IT support is the most important
experience he feels he can give learners in this
pressurised work setting.
Soft skills such as those taught in the EOH work
readiness programme are a critical part of preparation
for learners in his unit, given the emphasis on customer
service in their performance areas.
David Mabasa & Dikeledi Malomane, whose interviews
appear in this report, are under his supervision.
“You find it typically with students coming out of the
colleges and out of their technical training and now they
think that they know all. That’s where you have to take
them to the reality and give them that guidance and say
listen, this is how you treat a customer, this is how you
deal with a customer. What do you do with a customer
when they are irate and angry and their business is
standing still. To them its money, to them its a crisis,
and the crisis can be as small as a key not working on a
keyboard. And you have to understand and sometimes
its something that’s not within your realm of ability to fix.
It could be a Telkom (telco) line, but you have to then
coach your customer and make them understand okay
that this is the problem, this is what you are going to do
to resolve the problem.”