Jobs and skills crisis
One of the most vexing questions of our times in this country is how to address the joblessness crisis; more specifically, the ticking time bomb that is youth unemployment. We cannot create jobs if we do not stimulate the economy and encourage the rapid growth of existing businesses and the creation of new ones.
In the midst of all this, we have to deal with a world that is undergoing profound, ongoing change and with that a lot of talk about how we train people for this new world of work which will be underpinned by AI and machine learning and where the perpetual rate of change will force us to learn, unlearn and relearn from now until we draw our last breath.
Entrepreneur and author, Robert Kiyosaki is fond of saying that irrespective of the symbols our school leavers get, globally the school system is designed to churn out Es: employees. The A students become attorneys and accountants, actuaries, doctors and engineers. Some of the B-aggregate matrics will go into the professions too.
It’s human nature to want our children to do well, to do better than we have, but a blind determination to get them into university and qualified, hopefully in one of the professions, means that for the most part they will end up working for someone else — probably someone who only got a C, or lower, were denied entry into university and so they had to create their own magic.
It is important to always remember that the professions mostly do not drive the economy, they manage it and make it saner. That should never mean that there is no place for them in the brave new world. On the contrary; we need professionals to scale up and make what has been created more effective, we need professionals to establish standards and ethics and to hold people to account.
The bean counters and the bean growers are mutually interdependent, yet the bean growers seem to get less emphasis in our education system.
We need entrepreneurs, we need rainmakers and unfortunately, our education system hardly allows us to encourage this, beyond the usual tired extra-mural attempt to sell home-baked pies or a badly constructed rabbit hutch in your final year at primary school. We have placed a primacy on academic excellence, but so little on entrepreneurial excellence. It’s a mistake because the skill set required to excel academically through a deep and narrow analysis is perhaps the polar opposite of the attributes needed for inventing and hustling the big deals.
Imagine if we created another category of excellence in our school system to recognise and encourage those who can think out of the box, find solutions and monetise them? We would probably often find the academic Cs are the venture/rainmaker As.
We live in a world of three dimensions. We need to encourage the creation of a fourth dimension — people who can disrupt the world we live in, shatter the corporate glass houses of habits and vested interests that keep an economy that is adequate from transforming into a new model.
We need innovation — not breathless and incoherent, but grounded, informed, bold and developing answers for questions many of us haven’t even begun to formulate yet.
We also need to develop skill sets and qualifications for the 95% of South African school starters who don’t get a degree within five years of leaving school.
Those who are neither swotting up to join the managerial class, nor becoming the entrepreneurs that start the companies; we need to develop people who actually do the work; the crafts- and the tradespeople, an entire subset of workers who somehow got lost in the last 30 years in the headlong rush to wear office clothes and ultimately sit around a table.
The answers exist, but the hardest part of all will be accepting them — changing a process that has been hotwired into the South African psyche for generations.
The simple truth is accountants and attorneys, valuable as they are, don’t kickstart the economy — and at this stage, our economy is deindustrialising as we speak. We must turn it around, not manage the little that is left.