Transforming education to tackle South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis

THE G20 Leaders’ Summit is over, now the hard work to implement and apply its many declarations must start.

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One particular declaration that must be taken to heart if we want to address a core challenge at the heart of our stalled economy, is the absolute necessity of reducing the rate of young people not in employment, education, or training (NEET) by a further 5% by 2030.

This calls for a whole new way of thinking about teaching, learning, and employment, and South Africa's government, its business leaders and institutions of higher learning will have to work together to change the narrative.

For example, instead of complaining about skills shortages, we can collaborate to actively define and invest in the skills our economy needs; and rather than seeing training as a cost associated with the existing workforce we can reframe it as the most critical form of capital investment we can make.

Research indicates that companies that put talent at the centre of their business strategy realise higher total shareholder returns than their competitors. Imagine this principle at the heart of a nation?

Reframing the future of talent

The world today is defined by complexity, turbulence, and the stark reality of the “knowing-doing gap.” We are living in a period where skills, once good enough to fuel a 30-year career, are often on the path to obsolescence within five years.

Against this tumultuous backdrop, South Africa faces a domestic crisis that is both existential and avoidable, namely a vast, frustrated pool of youth trapped by a desperate shortage of job-ready skills. It's time for a national reset in how we approach this challenge, and it starts, like many good strategic thinking processes, by reframing. For too long, we have clung to the notion that the university degree is the sole valid destination after high school.

This prejudice creates an immense, destructive bottleneck, with just four out of every 100 South African children who start school going on to get a formal degree within six years of matriculating.