'More action needed'

Cape Town - With the government's new skills development initiative launched, analysts said last week that more action than lip service was needed to improve the ability of people to do their jobs better.

Pan African advisory services chief executive Iraj Abedian said: "It is about time we deal with the issue of skills development head-on and not just talk about it."

He said government and business were ideal partners in improving the skills of the people for the benefit of the economy.

Deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka launched the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) in partnership with business last week.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said: "Nothing short of a skills revolution by a nation united will extricate us from the crisis we face."

Cultivating scarce skills

The initiative is in addition to the labour department's National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) which focuses on cultivating scarce skills.

Jipsa is a short-term intervention while the NSDS has a R21.9bn budget covering 2005 to 2010.

Scarce skills identified in Jipsa so far include city, regional and rural planning, engineering and technical skills, management and planning skills in education, health and in municipalities.

A team led by Haroon Bhorat of the University of Cape Town is compiling a database of skill requirements.

The private sector has committed itself to skills development through the various transformation charters.

Black Management Forum president Nolitha Fakude said: "We forget that to sustain empowerment, you need black people and women to run those companies. Skills development has been an area that we have tended to overlook."

Private sector needs to come to the party

She said the private sector needed to come to the party in terms of skills development and in the spirit of the transformation charters.

She said the focus on equity ownership has relegated skills development to the margins.

Abedian said: "There is nothing wrong with emphasis on equity but not at the expense of operational involvement and the acquisition of skill."

Chia-Chao Wu, a director at ratings agency Empowerdex, said once implemented, the codes of good practice will address the issues of skills development significantly.

Wu said a key element of the codes is that skills development will count as much as ownership.

The NSDS focuses on the sector education and training authorities (Setas) and Further Education and Training (FET) colleges.

Too much emphasis on training

National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Gwede Mantashe, who leads the Jipsa technical task team, highlighted the importance of FETs but warned that their perceived inferior status must be changed. He said the Setas placed too much emphasis on training than skilling.

Anglo-Gold Ashanti chief executive Bobby Godsell advocated for a partnership between business and FETs. The Business Trust pledged to inject R2m into he recapitalisation of FETs.

The labour market is full of contradictions. The country has the problem of a growing number of graduates who are unemployed.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said Jipsa needed to find ways of absorbing unemployed graduates into the economy while addressing the mismatch in relation to the type of training offered to these students as compared to skills needed by the job market.

Jipsa forms one of the corner stones of government's Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for SA (Asgisa) which involves a range of interventions to help propel the economy to a sustainable 6% growth rate.

Ray of hope

Mlambo-Ngcuka said: "If we fail in the human resource and skills development sphere, Asgisa fails."

The lack of relevant skills mean that one in every four people of working age is unemployed.

There is a ray of hope though as the economy grows.

Employment statistics released by Stats SA this week showed an increase in employment in the fourth quarter of 2005 with 90 000 people finding work in the formal sector.