Yesterday’s Business Day carried a headline article on Mbeki’s view on the job situation. Right at the end of the article Iraj Abedian suggested that the halving of unemployment by 2014 would depend on how fast South African workers became skilled.
“The economy has moved through a higher level of job creation capacity. At some time jobs became more skilled and technical because of the way the economy has moved, so older South Africans have found themselves out of jobs. The unemployment rate will not drop if people do not re-skill.”
The underlined quote is important. I cannot count the number of times clients have told me that they want to train their older staff members and that these people show no interest in the training. Here we have it from the experts that these people are engineering their own redundancy.
Then there is the question about skills development and the new codes. The 3% payroll target remains, and there doesn’t seem to be any incentive for results. In other words, if you spend the money you get the points. I don’t think this is the best idea for a few reasons:
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You could spend money on wasted causes.
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How much time will this training take from the staff member’s productive office time.
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What are the business benefits (other than scorecard points) of spending this money.
Admittedly I haven’t seen the new codes yet. But if this code is going to succeed then there has to be a qualitative aspect to it.
If you have any thoughts, ideas or experience in this matter please comment. We’ve all got to get a better understanding of this issue.