Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane
New employer incentives are now available to companies that participate in the government’s massive programme to combat the country’s crisis of unemployment and skills shortage especially among the youth.
While all companies contribute to the national skills development levy, regulations published in the Government Gazette this month allow employers to claim grants if they offer “learnerships” in their workplaces.
This week ministers of labour and education Membathisi Mdladlana and Kader Asmal launched a joint learnership drive in Johannesburg in an upbeat kickstart of a programme they say will revolutionise skills training and development.
This comes at the time that Statistics SA released figures showing a frighteningly high unemployment rate of 35,9% as of September last year.
“A learnership combines structured learning or theory with practical work experience,” said Mdladlana at the launch. Learnerships provide the opportunity for “stone throwers to become stone cutters and jewellers, for warmongers to become peace brokers”.
Asmal said learnerships will resolve the old dilemma of: “I can’t get work because I have no experience, but I can’t get experience without work.”
So far 30 new learnerships have been registered with the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), and the government aims to have 3 000 people enrolled in learnerships by March next year and 80 000 people under the age of 30 enrolled by 2005.
According to the new regulations, people in learnerships will earn no less than R120 a week. This, says Asmal, will address a further dilemma: “I can’t get a job without a qualification, but I cannot afford to study because I don’t have a job and cannot afford the fees, transport and other costs.”
Learnerships will be based on a contract between a learner, an employer and a training provider. On average they will constitute year-long programmes after which the employer can decide whether to take the learner on or not.
Mdladlana repeatedly stressed the benefits employers will reap from implementing learnerships. He cited the International Labour Organisation’s 2001 World Employment Report, which pinpointed a discrepancy between the high demand for technological expertise and the low level of appropriate training. This has led to a marked deceleration in productivity growth rates.
Realising the potential of machines depends on people, securing customers depends on people and producing quality goods depends on people, who are at the very heart of the productivity quest, said Mdladlana.
“Potential investors to South Africa know this very well our skills shortage is surely one of the reasons they are so scarce.”
In addition, learnerships will lay a meaningful basis on which self-employment can be built, “so don’t just think of learners as potential employees, think of them as potential suppliers, distributors and customers too”, he said.
Vacancies in the labour market due to HIV/Aids deaths will have to be addressed, Mdladlana said, as will gaps “left by high-flyers” who leave the country one in five graduates emigrate. Deepening the skills crisis was a sharp fall in the number of apprenticeships between 1975 and 1999, due to economic recession and declines in the mining and engineering industries.
Learnerships will “revitalise and reconstruct the technical and vocational parts of the education system, which have been failing the country for many years”, Asmal said. For instance, only 15% of college graduates find jobs.
By this time next year, Asmal announced, there will be fewer than 50 further education and training institutions in place of the more than 150 current colleges, “which are poorly distributed to serve the people who need them, and uneven in quality”.
But learnerships are not situated solely at the level of college-type vocational courses. The entire range of educational institutions universities, technikons, colleges and private providers will be involved, Asmal said.
Education and training have created a “rift … between theory and practice”, he said. Learnerships aim to bridge the huge divide between professional and artisan sectors. They will enable technicians or artisans to move to managerial levels, for example.
Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas) of which there are 25 in diverse areas such as finance and banking, retail, manufacturing, information technology and forestry are identifying areas of skills shortages. They will on this basis develop learnerships that must register with the NQF.
Setas also allocate grants to employers. New regulations require that Setas specify the size of the grant to be paid to the employer for employed and previously unemployed learners. Young black people, women and the disabled will be given preference for enrolment in learnerships.
Messages of support at the launch came from organised labour, the NGO sector and business. Business representative Andre Dippenaar said: “We need a joint implementation programme between the departments of labour and education. Employers see skills and training as an expensive hobby and an onerous task. But we must continue.”
“Made in SA, stayed in SA” must be the aim of the learnership programme, he said.