David Macfarlane
Vastly changed global trends in the job market, in combination with South Africa’s massive unemployment rate, now place unique pressures on individuals seeking to make themselves employable. And with the government having launched its National Skills Strategy in February at a major conference in Midrand, private-sector initiatives to help people help themselves should be receiving far more government backing than they are at present, say Lorraine Silverman and Naren Sewpaul of Training and Development Options.
They point out that the world of work has changed radically. “Mass retrenchments by the largest and most historically successful corporations have done away with the concept of lifelong employment and the faithful employee,” says Silverman. Job security and one-job-for-life are a thing of the past which in turn means that traditional career planning is now of little use to individual employees.
Added to this is a “depressing” national employment scenario, in which every economically active individual is matched by someone out of work. Silverman and Sewpaul observe that the changed national and global job market involves jobs themselves being dismantled, not merely people being shunted out of jobs.
“This does not mean that there is no work to be done,” says Silverman. “It simply means that organisations [are] less inclined to package work into jobs. More and more, large organisations outsource work to smaller companies operating successfully in a niche that suits a narrower area of expertise. The bureaucracies of the public sector increasingly find the need to privatise their services. Government departments are under increasing pressure to downsize, restructure and run leaner.”
So what can individuals do? The need for transferable skills is now paramount, argue Silverman and Sewpaul. They point to Department of Labour statistics showing increasing numbers of older beneficiaries of the Unemployment Insurance Fund, with a growing proportion from 35- to 49-year-olds. And, among job seekers who have registered with the labour department, “there is a gradual trend towards more highly qualified people registering”.
In this context of “re-careering and multi-careering”, individuals “can and must break the mould of what they’ve been told they are”. Silverman recalls that her own first experience of this need came when, having been retrenched, she found herself applying skills derived from management training and development to the promotion of seedless watermelons.
But, say Silverman and Sewpaul, whether you’re a mid-career worker who is retrenched or a first-time job-seeker, we all have one thing in common: we need to be able to discover skills we might be unaware or have forgotten we possess. And assisting individuals to do this via carefully tailored workshops is something the private sector can provide. Silverman and Sewpaul run a programme called Work Sharp, for example. It puts the onus on individuals to discover their own capabilities and needs, rather than relying on organisations to do this for them. This can involve becoming aware of skills one has unconsciously acquired, for instance and dovetails with the government’s commitment, via the National Qualifications Framework, to recognising prior learning.
“The blunt blade of conventional career advice,” says Silverman, has reached its sell-by date. “Let’s demystify the job market: going the employment agency and CV route is no longer adequate by itself. Individuals need to be empowered to discover their own skills and take responsibility for their own career path.”