Seeking jobs, cap ’n gown in hand
Education gives better chances overall, but there’s a rough start
● In the third quarter of this year more than half of the people who were unemployed had an education level below matric, whereas the unemployment rate for those with a matric qualification was 35%, according to the labour force survey published this week.
Jobs are hard to come by in SA, even for skilled young people. But your chances of finding a job also depend on how young you are, where you live and your race.
Close to two in every 100 unemployed people during the quarter were graduates, according to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the third quarter.
SA’s statistician-general, Risenga Maluleke, said this week that the younger the graduate, the higher the unemployment rate and their inability to find work.
Graduates aged 15 to 24 years have a 27.7% unemployment rate.
There are 10.3-million young people aged 15 to 24 and, out of those, about 3.1million are not working or are in education and training, according to Stats SA.
“Yet even those that are looking for employment are not able to pick up employment,” Maluleke said.
“Then you can see young people are vulnerable to labour markets, they are highly affected. Whether it’s a ticking time bomb or not, it wouldn’t be for me to try and say.”
He said graduates aged between 35 and 44 years had an unemployment rate of 22%, less than for younger people — “which tells you that young people become a lot more vulnerable”.
“Generally, unlike people of other ages, they don’t move a lot,” he said, in reference to young people’s limited resources to migrate to where work might be available.
Maluleke said the unemployment rate for graduates overall was higher than the national unemployment rate of 27.5%.
But for those aged between 25 and 34 years, the rate was 9.4% and for those who are older — aged between 35 and 64 years — it is 3.9%.
Maluleke said this was because, “generally, there is a mismatch in skills. Young people don’t have the prerequisite skills that are required to take up employment.”
But Trudi Makhaya, economist and economic adviser to President Cyril Ramaphosa, said only 2%, or 120,000, of the 6-million unemployed were graduates.
“It’s a lot, but at the same time the overwhelming majority of the unemployed are people with matric or less.
“Your chances of unemployment with a graduate degree are probably higher than you’d like, but are so much lower than someone with just a matric.”
Makhaya said the quality of education mattered, and this was evident in the lack of growth in the number of “own-account workers” or entrepreneurs captured in the Quarterly Employment Survey for the second quarter.
“It does show that people find it difficult to step out on their own, which speaks to the kind of skills they have.
“The quality of skills is important.”
She said there had been a “structural shift” in SA’s education system towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses at tertiary level rather than the humanities.
“That too will make a difference going forward. Even if it’s a few people, those people, if they stay in STEM, can create jobs for other people who are not necessarily in STEM if they create factories and innovations.”
Of the 6.2-million unemployed people in SA recorded during the third quarter of this year, a large number (2.86-million) had attended secondary school but did not obtain their matric. In all, 2.18-million of the unemployed had matric.
Only 504,000 were tertiary education graduates.
Among race groups, the highest unemployment rate was among black people at 5.5-million, a 31.1% unemployment rate.
This was followed by coloureds with 473,000 people out of work during the quarter, a 21.8% unemployment rate.
People classified as Indian/Asian recorded 60,000 jobless, an unemployment rate of 10. 1%.
There were 144,000 unemployed whites, which recorded an unemployment rate of 7.1%, according to Stats SA.
‘Young people are vulnerable to labour markets, they are highly affected’