The Department of Employment and Labour (DEL) has put a stop to the “willy-nilly” funding of skills training programmes, after some resulted in poor employment outcomes, Minister Thulas Nxesi revealed this week.

Speaking at the ten-year celebrations of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Researching Education and Labour on August 18, he said that, when he started his role as Minister of the department, it was facilitating and funding training which was only minimally informed by labour market research and skills planning.

“In some ways, we had a bizarre supply-led training model, with training institutions largely setting the agenda for skills training,” he noted.

The “very real” downside of this approach was that, when unemployed people received training, which was not aligned to the needs of the labour market, such individuals remained unemployed, he said.

“I wish I could say that, as a department, we now have the necessary capacity in regard to labour market analysis. But, we are some way off that, and need to rely on cooperation with other entities,” stated Nxesi.

Through the Unemployment Insurance Fund’s (UIF’s) Labour Activation Programme (LAP), the DEL contributed to training of the unemployed as part of government initiatives to stimulate the creation of jobs in the labour market, he pointed out.

Through the Training of the Unemployed Programme, the UIF implemented projects with implementing partners – a process with guaranteed employment at the end of the term of the project, said Nxesi.

To this end, he highlighted that the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, for instance, had already absorbed over 14 000 participants from one of the projects funded through the LAP.

Nxesi added that the LAP had taken a strategic direction in which training of the unemployed was skills demand-led, leading to employment at the end of the training period. “The employers and partners who participate in the programme commit to ensuring that the trainees will be absorbed.”

In the current medium-term expenditure framework period, the LAP has planned for 75 000 participants in programmes that enhance their employability.

Despite the cost of the UIF’s Covid-19 Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme’s benefits paid out in the past two years, the UIF set aside R2.4-billion for the LAP, whose objective was to assist unemployed workers re-entering the labour market and participating meaningfully in economic activities by establishing and funding small enterprises in the hospitality, tourism, agriculture and information and communications technology economic sectors. 

“With the focus on jobs, the department has homed in on training for guaranteed jobs, effectively substituting this for an in-depth labour market analysis.

“This is all very well for boosting job numbers in the short term; but clearly, this does not begin to come to terms with broader future trends in the demand for particular skills, and a further challenge with our approach to training is that certain of the required skills will have longer lead times in the training thereof,” he said.