South African businesses continue to struggle to find adequate skills in South Africa as a result of government’s focus on building supply-side interventions – such as sector skills councils, qualifying frameworks and the grading of qualifications – rather than taking tangible action to create the required skills base.

This emerged in the latest edition of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s yearly transformation audit, titled “Breaking the mould: Prospects for radical socioeconomic transformation”, released on Wednesday.

Education and labour specialist Andre Kraak argued in the report that government should balance its typically “Anglo-Saxon” approach with deeper engagement with business to better balance its skills development and training approach.

As policymakers had largely bypassed the private sector, which should be instrumental in creating jobs for graduates from technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges – previously called further education and training colleges – and should therefore participate in shaping the current regulatory environment, employers had not sufficiently bought into the reforms, he noted.

“The South African economy needs intermediary skills and [TVET] colleges are best suited to support this demand.

“However, government may be laboring under a misinterpretation of what business requires, believing that training for the ‘knowledge economy’ should supersede the creation of intermediary skills because it will have a negative impact on low-paid, semi- and unskilled work,” he commented.

In addition, by centralising skills development policy within the Department of Higher Education and Training, government may find itself locked into a narrow approach that limited the development of alternative strategies to boost skills development, said Kraak.

“However, this could also mean that any approach could be adjusted quicker, as there would be fewer government department stakeholders to contend with,” he asserted.

The education specialist referenced various successful international skills development initiatives that had been designed to meet the needs of local and regional businesses, and which featured partnerships between policymakers, businesses, training agencies, nongovernmental organisations and learning institutions.

According to the report, the Global Competitiveness Index, which measured the ability of institutions to create a globally competitive nation, demonstrated that the South African national skills development crisis was causing the country to slip down the rankings, while inward investment prospects were being harmed by the perceived shortage of required skills.