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JEREMY MAGGS: I want to stay on the same theme and use that word collaboration. As June’s Youth Month ends, the country is still grappling with effective ways to unlock this vital cohort’s potential for driving change, and there is now a growing urgency to adopt a new approach to tackling employment. You’ve just heard that from the chief executive officer of Accenture.
We’re going to talk now to Erica Kempken, who is director at the non-profit youth@WORK, which focuses on placement and internship and learnership programmes. She’s with me now and says a better enabling environment through focused collaboration has now become crucial to generate more job opportunities. So Erica Kempken, how does all of this work?
ERICA KEMPKEN: So collaboration is most important; on a very practical level, companies need to speak to the technikons, the universities, what skills are needed, what skills are needed now, but particularly what skills might be needed in two or three years’ time or five years’ time.
This is where it becomes tricky because businesses often don’t quite know what skills they’re needing, but they need to tell the institutions well in advance because training material needs to be prepared, curriculum needs to be designed, and then the trainers need to be available before you even onboard the learners and get them done.
A classic example is, I was in Richards Bay two weeks ago, we looked at a mass solar project, which is now looking at solar installations, and there is no curriculum for solar or solar installation. So it’s now a [high-demand] job, and we are saying we don’t have people who can do the job, but we haven’t trained people ahead of time in order to be ready for the job.
So we are in the stage of re-skilling, upskilling, and taking people who’ve done other qualifications and putting them into current jobs. Then there is collaboration needed in terms of getting them work ready for this specific intervention.
JEREMY MAGGS: So I’m wondering to myself how business then needs to up its game.
ERICA KEMPKEN: Correct; business needs to constantly think ahead, plan ahead and communicate those plans effectively to institutions so that they can then do all the development work that’s necessary and get the youth ready.
JEREMY MAGGS: So whose job within an organisation is this?
ERICA KEMPKEN: There are lots of CEOs who are collectively getting together with establishments, particularly in the education space. I was on a forum not long ago with universities, and we looked at, for example, public administration is still a course that’s being offered a lot by universities, but there are very few people who get employed in public administration roles.
So that is a qualification which should not be open anymore. It should not be taught anymore because the jobs don’t exist there.
So I think it is really leadership, it’s senior leadership who needs to think well ahead in terms of strategy and then engage with the leadership of the educational institutions, and they together need to have a game plan.
JEREMY MAGGS: You talk about that engagement with business leaders and educational institutions. In an ideal world, how does that conversation go? How do they engender better collaboration?
ERICA KEMPKEN: So, as CEOs, we get invited to different forums. Universities know that they are preparing young people for being thinkers, being innovators. So university doesn’t prepare only for the job. They really prepare base skills and knowledge and prepare you to do research and think on the job so that you can apply your skills.
In technical institutions, it’s slightly different. But universities generally do engage with forums, and they then sit together with government and sit together with strategy and then collaborate with them. So QCTO (Quality Council for Trades and Occupations), and SAQA (South African Qualifications Authority), those institutions do sit together with industry and plan ahead.
JEREMY MAGGS: You’re close to the coalface of all of this. Where is the biggest skills deficiency right now?
ERICA KEMPKEN: It’s a tricky question. It depends on what type of jobs you are looking for. For example, in tech, we are saying that there are a lot of jobs in IT, but we know that there are unemployed graduates in it as well. So some other jobs are not full-time jobs, they’re gig jobs, and they are jobs that are open to the world. South Africans might be sitting over here but working for a company outside of South Africa.
Equally, South African companies might be taking people from other places in the world. So you’ve got developers from India who are being contracted to a workplace in South Africa.
So we need to have the resilience; we need to have the constant flexibility of upskilling and reskilling through e-learning predominantly so that we are ready for the world economy, not only for our South African economy.
So to answer your question, there definitely are tech jobs available, which we are not filling. There are others, like I was saying, in the green economy that we are not filling because we haven’t prepared our youth adequately enough, and I’m not sure of all the other sectors.
JEREMY MAGGS: Just a very quick one, your organisation youth@WORK focuses on placement and internship. Absolutely critical through that skillset that confidence, and professionalism is taught in order to contribute to participants’ success in the workplace.
ERICA KEMPKEN: Yes, and we try and fill the gaps in between. So we’ll take somebody who’s maybe got no qualification or got a matric and, very importantly, we partner them with a supervisor. So the transfer of practical skills, the transfer of experience, that is what really happens in that year, we don’t have time to put everybody on all sorts of fancy training courses, and then we bring them into the organisation.
That one year is really the transfer of skills, the handover of skills, the adaption of the young person from being previously unemployed to now learning about this working environment. So that internship is focused on those work readiness and success skills that are needed in order to continue being employed. It’s a very critical gap that does not come from an educational institution or from a traditional workplace that’s not focused on youth development.
JEREMY MAGGS: And I’m going to thank you, Erica Kempken, director at the non-profit youth@WORK. Thank you very much.
