According to data released by Statistics South Africa during the first quarter of 2023, the country’s unemployment rate increased to 32.9%. This was due to a range of factors, but mainly a lack of skills and training opportunities.
Experts suggest that companies can leverage learnerships as an effective tool to tackle the country’s high youth unemployment and equip young people with the skills they need to empower them to become employable, or to venture into entrepreneurship.
By offering on-the-job training, learnerships empower young people with essential skills that cannot be acquired through traditional methods alone.
Careers Portal spoke to Rajan Naidoo who is the Managing Director of EduPower Skills Academy to gain some insight on how learnerships can help address the country’s high unemployment figures.
Rajan says that when the Skills Development Act was created and learnerships come into being, he saw it as an opportunity to address the skills deficit within the South African economy.
We've had a history of Higher academic institutions that offer degrees, diplomas, those types of [qualifications] at universities of technology, but on the vocational and artisanal side, the SETAs and more recently QCTOs, fills that huge [skills] gap.
How Learnerships Work
Naidoo says that learnerships are very important because they offer a range of opportunities, including a balance between practical and theory work.
He explains that 30% of the work in a learnership is 30 based and 70% of which is work experience.
“Unlike [at] universities, it's almost all theory and then when you graduate, companies don't want to hire you because you haven't had work experience,” says Rajan.
Learnerships also operate on a earn-while-you-work basis, meaning participants have some money coming in while they undergo learning opportunities for the duration of the learnership period.
So, for the 12 months of the learnership, the sponsor will give you a stipend even if it's a minimum wage, around R4000 or about.
In addition to a stipend, once students have completed the learnership they also receive a formal qualification with the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), which is extremely important.
An income and a formal qualification make learnerships a very powerful instrument, says Naidoo, especially for graduates to gain some work experience.
Learnerships have also led to employers and training providers creating work opportunities, specifically for learnership graduates.
Offering Vocational Subjects At Schools
Rajan believes that within the Basic Education sector, vocational streams should be offered from Garde 10 onwards, so that by the time a learner gets to Grade 12, a large component can already be employable.
It's something that the Department of Basic Education should take seriously, because too many [young] people are going through the academic stream and ending up in Grade 12; some go on to universities which are important, some go to universities of technology, but these are academic streams.
Naidoo notes that there is also a large percentage of youth that's left without any prospects after they complete high school, and that's where vocational streams come in to fill the gap.
“At a very early age, you say to them [the youth], that one of the potential streams that they could do, and you add that to vocational skills, somebody can be a baker, a cook, an electrician, a plumber, those are all businesses that you can run.”
He says that high schools should start to offer vocational subjects as an alternative to young people, as it is a much shorter route to employment.
The Learnership programme was developed in South Africa as a modern way to advance apprenticeships to meet the modern demands of the workplace. Learnerships also manage to formalise the learning and workplace experience - which is usually sadly lacking in internships offered by companies.
Another significant benefit of Learnerships over internships is that Learnerships come with a formal pay structure where learners will be paid a monthly stipend, or payment, for the time they are on the Learnership. Also, internships do not have a learning component, while Learnerships are all linked directly to a formal qualification.
