Skills audit will help close the gaps

THE national skills audit now in progress, will be finding out just what sort of skilled people live in Zimbabwe, the level of the skills they possess and even the level of practical experience they have.

The audit will also uncover where there are gaps and potential loopholes in the range of skilled people, with these likely to appear as our economy develops and the expansion and the new directions could be turning adequate numbers of a particular skill into a shortage.

For example, the huge expansion in mining over the last five years has obviously stretched the pool of those with many mining skills, meaning that more training opportunities need to be opened since the flow of skilled people into the industry now needs to be larger.

There are other areas where shortages have been appearing as the economy expands, or new areas are opened up, or the Government moves forward in improving services to the nation.

It is necessary to quantify these shortages, and work out if the flows from universities and colleges is good enough to meet the challenge, or whether more resources need to be devoted to particular areas.

In some cases, such as health, the brain drain is a major factor, so a lot of the predictive work needs to look at the effectiveness of measures to arrest the brain drain, and then see how much extra needs to be done in medical schools.

In this field it is considered likely that we need a combination of both, more training, but keeping a far higher percentage of those we train.

Just as important as the audit of skills now available, and working out what levels of skills will be required this year, next year and in five and 10 years time, are the measures being taken to fill the gaps.

This is not an instant process and can take years. For example, we almost certainly need more people with engineering and technical backgrounds as well as more with the entrance level subjects required for medical training.

Here we might well have to work a long way down the ladder, to ensure that all secondary schools have decent science teaching with the required laboratories and the sort of science teacher who can teach science and the scientific method, before preparing pupils for the examinations.

The examinations simply measure progress; what is vital is that the pupils can think scientifically and apply science.

The new Education 5.0 obviously fits in here, with its stress on theory, practice and application.

But we need to note that before we have more young people getting reasonable O and A level grades in scientific and technical subjects, we have to upgrade a large swathe of secondary schools.

Only when the pool of scientific teenagers is large enough can we move to the next step of more places at technical and polytechnic colleges, at the engineering and scientific faculties at universities and the like.

This delay in building up the training to fill a gap must be why many of the skills shortages identified in 2018 are still there.

There is a second factor. Obviously a fair amount of work has been done to boost training in the most critically short areas, but at the same time it is those areas that have seen the largest expansion, so to a degree we are running very fast to stay in place.

If we are short of a particular skill that takes five years of training to reach the minimum standard, and then you double demand in those five years, you have to do a bit better than double the number of people under training.

Which means you somehow have to find the training staff, who are likely to be the sort of people who many employers want to run the operations, at a higher salary. So you bunch up the problems as you upgrade training.

A good example might well be the mining sector. When we talk about mining engineers and mining technicians and the highly-skilled top end of the general mining labour force, we need to look at the quadrupling in mining output since 2017.

While this does not necessarily mean a quadrupling in the labour force, since efficiencies and the like kick in, it must mean that there are a lot more people employed in mining at well above the easy-to-train semiskilled workers.

Mining companies are keen to make it clear that they give maximum priority to local communities living around a new mine when it comes to the lower levels of staff who are trained on site, but that same new mine still needs to hunt down and employ skilled staff and then poach or transfer its top end skilled and experienced managers from existing mines.

The Second Republic has been adding more State universities so that there is now at least one in every province. Some are still on the small side, but being physically in place, they can quickly grow.

The new universities have often been given roles to specialise in particular technical or scientific areas, which allows a smaller university finding its feet to assemble a proper research base in those speciality subjects.

At the same time steps have been taken to upgrade the technical schools and polytechnics, so they can provide a far stronger flow of technicians, and to upgrade the schools so they can graduate far more pupils able to benefit from this surge in training.

We have also started taking the vocational colleges a lot more seriously, so that the more average school leaver can get practical skills to earn a decent living.

The skills audit is essential and useful. It tells us where we need to make the major efforts, and it tells us where we need to work out how we can get a decent flow of trainees from schools, and the changes needed there.