Higher Education and Training Minister Dr Blade Nzimande appealed to business on Tuesday to provide artisans and learners with access to their facilities to gain "structured workplace experience", the lack of which he described as the main constraint to meeting South Africa's skills development objectives.
Speaking on the anniversary of the formation of his department, Nzimande told delegates to the annual Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa conference that the availability of quality, structured workplace experience, which was aligned with the theoretical and practical curricula, was the "real bottleneck".
A round table would be convened later in the year at which government would seek to debate ways of overcoming the problem with both business and labour.
Nzimande said that he had been impressed, during a recent visit to Germany, with that country's "dual system", whereby trainees worked for four days in a week and attended college classes on the fifth.
"I must therefore appeal to employers with a proven track record in engineering-related artisan development to open up their workplaces and take on additional learners in artisan and trade-related apprenticeships, learnerships and structured work-experience programmes to enable them to meet the requirements for trade testing and achieve artisan certificated status," he added.
Government's economic policy priority, he added, was the stimulation of investment into the productive sectors for the economy, supported by appropriate skills development.
The Department of Higher Education and Training was, therefore, prioritising the following:
- The expansion of artisan training.
- The creation of a credible third National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS3), as well as restructured Sector Education and Training Authorities.
- The strengthening of the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges.
The Minister promised to take a personal responsibility for the acceleration of artisan training, as well as for the creation of a national register for artisans.
The register would hold the names and details of all those who had qualified through the relevant trade test and were practising as artisans in the trade in which they had qualified.
However, Nzimande also expressed his disappointment with the fact that no mention had been made about the importance of skills development in a joint declaration signed a day earlier between three major trade union federations and a grouping of important South African manufacturers.
The declaration outlined several other interventions to improve the industrialisation prospects of the economy, including a strident call for intervention to weaken the South African currency.
"We welcome the initiative by labour and employers in the manufacturing industry seeking industrial and economic policy interventions to create decent jobs.
"However, I must express my disappointment that the joint declaration, signed by the country's three major trade union federations and a grouping of important South African manufacturers, failed to make any mention about the importance of skills development and the necessity for a skills development strategy to support those initiatives," Nzimande said.
"I also intend engaging organised labour on this matter as the creation of decent work and skills development are indivisible," the Minister said.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment