Accelerating Inclusive Youth Employment

Tony Mays reports on a recent conference convened to discuss the challenges of youth unemployment

In July 2014, the South African Institute of Race Relations Centre for Risk Analysis published an update on youth unemployment data with a foreword by LeratoMoloi which posed the following question: Is there a “perfect storm” on the horizon? The reason for this question was explained as follows:

With an unemployment rate of 36%, some 3,4 million not in employment, education, or training, and some 44% of those aged between 20 and 24 years not receiving any personal income, South Africa’s youth might just be the “perfect storm” waiting to happen.

On 08 and 09 September, 2014, this issue was addressed in a two-day conference co-hosted by the National Planning Commission, Harambee, Yellowwoods and the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection at the Spier Wine Estate in the Western Cape.

The event was well-attended by a diverse gathering of interested parties ranging from the host organisations through to a wide range of employers as well as representatives from education and training institutions and NGOs.

Although the numbers of youth who are not employed nor in education and training is a global concern, South Africa is somewhat unusual in having large numbers of unemployed young people on the one hand and a significant number of employment vacancies, particularly in entry level positions, on the other.

One of the key challenges that needs to be addressed, therefore, is how to bridge the gap between those seeking work and those wishing to employ. Many young people lack the social networks to learn about job opportunities that are available and then the financial means to attend interviews and maintain follow-up contacts. Harambee, the subject of the newsletter article, represents one strategy to overcome this gap, and has managed to place or to create opportunities for self-placement of about 10000 young people. The challenge is then how to scale up such interventions to successfully reach much larger numbers – to maybe 500000 placements per year to meet the recurring need for entry level posts – and simultaneously to grow those sectors of the economy such as light manufacturing which would be most likely to absorb young workers fresh from school or TVET college. It would then be necessary to improve career counselling and support in schools so that young people emerged with a better sense of possible career paths and realistic expectations of the kind of entry level job opportunities that would represent the first step on their employment and career pathways.

It has been noted that educational institutions cannot possibly tailor programmes to suit the requirements of every kind of job that might be available and particularly so given that new kinds of jobs emerge constantly (mobile applications developer, for example) but it should be possible to foster school and college graduates who have the basic knowledge, skills and dispositions on which work-specific and work-based learning can subsequently be built. Key requirements identified by employers include: basic numeracy (and particularly the ability to solve numeracy-based problems), verbal and written language skills (noting the increasing trend towards multi-national workplaces and opportunities), adaptability and resilience, curiosity, a positive attitude, energy, punctuality and the ability to work in teams. The implications of rising to this challenge at scale are well-recognised (see the CHET report Responding to the Educational Needs of Post-School Youth, Cloete 2009 for example).Saide believes that distance education methods informed by open learning principles has a key role to play in making it possible to work at the scale that is required. We need to learn from the more flexible provision of the open schooling movement to provide opportunities for education and training that provide the foundations for success in the work-placement interviews and entry tests that currently form an entry level barrier for many young people; but to do so in ways that recognise that some are already parents and many are involved in informal means of subsistence livelihoods and need to learn when and how it suits them.

This must be complemented, as noted above, by growth in the economy in those sectors most likely to be able to absorb young people such as light manufacturing, infrastructure maintenance and development, the BPO sector and the public sector.

One of the revelations for me personally at this meeting was preliminary research which suggests that young people who successfully access entry-level employment typically spend 22% of what they earn just on transport getting to and from the workplace. This is a significant cause of attrition. In addition, employers seem to recognise that punctuality challenges are often transport-related. Thus transport challenges represent a barrier not only for finding jobs but also for keeping them.

In conclusion, then, targeted growth of specific sectors in the economy, open-schooling to develop the skills on which work-place-based learning can subsequently be built and geographically-focussed recruitment to minimise transport challenges all seem to be key levers for accelerating inclusive youth employment.

References:

Cloete, N. Ed. 2009. Responding to the educational needs of post-school youth: Determining the scope of the problem and developing a capacity-building model.Wynberg: Centre for Higher education Transformation.

South African Institute for Race Relations. Fastfacts No. 7/2014/July 2014/Issue 275. Can be downloaded from