NEWS
5
NBI Green Skills initiative
South African youth continue to face several challenges in their
attempts to make a successful transition to the labour market. Their
pathways from schooling become stunted early on due to limited
opportunities in post-school education and training.
By The National Business initiative
THE CHALLENGE
For those youth who do gain access to technical
and vocational education and training (TVET), the
qualifications are theoretical in nature, poorly delivered
and colleges do not provide much access to practical
training. There are also limited opportunities to gain work
experience and on-the-job training.
As a result, the TVET system does not provide adequate
signals to employers that their graduates are worthy
candidates as either trainees or employees. This
contributes to high levels of inefficiency in recruitment
processes, and employers face the heavy financial
and resource burden of having to address their skills
needs amongst the available supply of school leavers
and college graduates. In the context of low economic
growth and resource constraints, the pressures on
industry invariably affects its ability to address this skills
mismatch, resulting in persistent skills shortages across
a range of occupations and pervasive unemployment for
large numbers of youth.
Therefore, the pathways from school to work are
not conducive for providing a cost-effective and
sustainable solution to the creation of a skills pipeline
for employment creation. Government has put in place
a number of demand-side incentives for enabling
effective pathways, but these incentives cannot
realise their objectives if the supply of skills and the
mechanisms for linking this supply into these incentives
are not addressed.
The challenges around poor TVET supply and industry
entry points operate in a context of the absence of a
social partnership between government, the private
sector and other relevant stakeholders. As such, there
are limited platforms for effective engagement around
comprehensive solutions.
THE GREEN SKILLS IN TVETS INITIATIVE
The National Business Initiative (NBI), together with
Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, Confederation
of Danish Industry (DI), GIZ, Business Leadership South
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
Africa, Nedbank and the Institute of Plumbing South
Africa (IOPSA) has been running a programme to scale-
up pathways into the Green Economy through public
TVET colleges.
The Green Economy provides a range of opportunities for
large-scale employment creation. However, pathways into
entry jobs in the Green Economy and the occupational
roles therein are not well defined and structured. This
restricts the potential of the Green Economy in realising
its full scope of employment creation.
The NBI Green Skills TVET Programme (GSTP) seeks to
unlock some of the opportunities in the Green Economy
and create more effective TVET learning pathways
for young people into these opportunities. This note
outlines a proposed partnership between NBI and the
Gauteng Department of Economic Development (GDED)
in realising the objectives of this programme and
thereby contributing to expand learning and employment
opportunities for unemployed youth.
The GSTP builds off a strong foundation laid by two
previous programmes designed and managed by the NBI
in the TVET college sector — the Construction Industry
Partnership and the Solar Water Heating Installation
and Maintenance project. These programmes have
illustrated some of the key ingredients for realising
successful pathways through colleges into labour market
opportunities and form the basis for this initiative.
These programmes illustrate the type of model of college
delivery that: best prepares students for the demands of
the workplace; enhances the capacity of TVET colleges
to deliver demand-led programmes; and facilitates the
necessary interaction between industry and colleges. The
model also provides signals by industry as to the quality
of candidates they expect from colleges and for industry
to see the value of engaging with public TVET colleges.
PROGRAMME SCOPE
Building on the NBI’s extensive experience in working
with the TVET sub-system, the core objective of the
June 2019 Volume 25 I Number 4