How can South Africa cope with the skills shortage?
The issue that many companies are confronted with today is how to handle the skills shortage in South Africa. The following article will consider new ways of coping with the skills shortage through learning and developing people. South Africa is facing a huge skills shortage and has a substantial unemployment problem dating back from the Apartheid era. Human Resources policies offer many solutions to these economic and social problems.
Improvement of basic and more advanced education and training should be a HR priority, as a way of fighting the unemployment problem and the skills shortage. HR specialist, Christine Janse van Rensburg suggests that the challenge is to equip South African people with a strong educational foundation and to give the workforce relevant and valuable skills. The government’s Human Resource Development Strategy of 2001 plays a role in this context as it ensures that the various components of the state work together in a coordinated way to deliver opportunities for human development.
The Skills Development Act also plays a role in addressing the skills shortage as it promotes a skill development policy that is adaptable, accessible and founded on a relationship between the private and public divisions. It provides for the formation and implementation of strategies which improve the skills in the South African workplace. It also provides for learnerships that later lead to job qualifications. Learnerships are training plans that incorporate both theoretical and practical work and result in a qualification. By encouraging workers to take part in learnerships, they allow entry-level workers into the labour field to acquire new skills, thus providing a means of increasing the amount of skilled workers.
The Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) were created through the Skills Development Act and their functions are: to implement sector skills development plans; to collect and distribute skills levies and to promote and establish learnerships. This body of authorities emphasises the importance of learnership programs in decreasing the skills shortage.
Babb and Meyer, in their book, Perspectives in Learnerships, state that one of the fundamentals of the skills development structure is learnerships and learnerships have the largest success. These ‘apprenticeships’ were modified from countries such as the United Kingdom. Learnerships are an effective means of addressing the skills shortage. Countries such as the UK and Australia, which adopted similar systems, received increased benefits for their respective companies and workers. The benefits of learnerships are huge. They can increase skilled labour, allow for utilisation of skills development in the workforce, decrease the number of unemployed South Africans and increase investment in education by employers.
Neotel is a telecommunications network operator that is based in Midrand. The skills shortage drove Neotel to launch a training academy in order to develop workers’ skills so they could satisfy current and future proficiency needs. Currently, Neotel produces excellent graduates in the rare field of information technology.
The Association for the Advancement of Black Accountants of Southern Africa (ABASA) was also started to address the skills deficiency, and ensure that black accountants could fulfil their potential. In the space of six months, the number of black chartered accountants increased by 22%, proving that it was effective in tackling the skills shortage.
Richard Rayne, the Managing Director of On-Site Training, suggests that companies train their personnel on-site as a means of developing their workers’ skills. He says that it saves money, inflates employee productivity, saves time and enhances skills.
Some organisations have had the greatest success using a combination of solutions. Ian Murdoch, former CEO of Philips Electronics, said that, “[their] human resources department used a combination of external and internal training along with learnerships and received impressive results."
It is clear that education and training are the key factors in regulating the skills shortage dilemma. The government, along with the private sector, is attempting to address this urgently by using all available human capital, so the gaps in skills can be filled.
Frew Murdoch is the assistant editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA degree in communications and English and a passion for HR technology. "I stumbled across your review of our Ethics Guide published 28 June 2012 and wish to thank you for the positive and complimentary comments made – this was a lovely surprise and most rewarding. I will certainly pass this on to all co-authors of the Guide."
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