Cutting out jobs for youth
‘Employers should stop testing for skill and look at potential’
ALMOST 8 million of South Africa’s 20 million young people are inactive, because they are neither studying nor working. This is according to Percy Moleke, the deputy director-general of the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Moleke was a speaker at the twoday Accelerating Inclusive Youth Employment conference this week.
Now in its fifth year, the event is convened by the Presidency, the Human Resources Development Council, Yellowwoods, Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection and Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.
The overall objective of the conference was to highlight, discuss and develop solutions to accelerating inclusive youth employment.
“We have a total population of 20 million young people. If you use our South African definition of youth, which is age 15 to 35, we have 20 million young people, and if you use an international definition, which is young people 15 to 24, we have about 10 million young people. What we are seeing is that, of the 20 million young people that we have, almost 7.8 million are not in education or in employment. The picture we are dealing with is that there are 7.8 million people in South Africa who are not active of the 20 million young people that we have, just to give you a sense of where we are at,” said Moleke.
She said there were about a million young people studying at universities and about 300 000 at other further education and training institutions, and about 10 million economically active young people, including those either employed, at university or seeking employment.
“That gives you a sense of the problems and challenges we are facing, and from the rural locations, we are dealing with a problem of exclusion. This is the challenge we are sitting on and that we all have to address,” she said.
On what needed to be done, Moleke said looking at the expansion strategy and focus on creating jobs and where the skill levels were matched with the relevant requirements, the problem was that, although jobs were available, most young people were unable to access them, because of the disadvantages they faced.
She added that judging from what some of the young people said about the challenges and disadvantages they faced when seeking employment, such as transport costs, cost of data and printing, they were particularly disadvantaged.
“It is difficult for them. Even if we were to create 2 million jobs tomorrow, there wouldn’t be an automatic transfer from a young person to that job, as the transitions have shown, and as we also all know, employer selection processes tend to favour a few.
“We are trying to change the employers’ mindsets to test for potential and not test for skill. So employers need to test for potential, take young people in and empower them, then you will see the results.”