It has been heartbreaking to witness over the years how skills development has turned into a mostly “checkbox” exercise that provides candidates little to no benefit in terms of their career growth. This is wrong! It keeps creating a buffer of young people who are unskilled and skip from one learnership to the next.

All that the training providers have to offer the industry (especially in ICT) is training and hosting the candidates, after which they are exited, leaving them with no better employment prospects than when they started the program. What skills were therefore being developed? Where are the empowerment and the impact?

While businesses may be happy with their scorecards, the time has come to ask a different question: Are we producing employable youth from the learnership program? In ICT, right now the general answer is “no”.

The solution is for employers to focus more on Vendor-certification. They must work with services providers who are able to find creative solutions for this problem. That is where true transformation will be found.