Internships remain critical for ad, design industry

Despite the world of advertising and design being extremely competitive, industry players have repeatedly acknowledged that the challenge of skills and skills development, particularly in terms of transformation, has to be met collectively. This is why companies like the Switch Group have actively supported and committed themselves to assisting the MAPPP SETA in developing a new pool of quality, up-and-coming talent through collaborative internship programmes.

Short and long-term priority

In our experience, internship programmes seem to be the most effective way of addressing the ongoing lack of black “creative” talent we're seeing emerge from education institutions in South Africa. As an industry and profession, we're still not managing to pique the interest of and attract sufficient scholars and students to pursue careers in advertising and design. While this will no doubt change over time, actively promoting and enabling transformation has to remain both a short and long-term priority. We cannot afford to wait for natural attrition into the industry.

Up until now, the MAPPP SETA's internship programme allowed industry players such as ourselves to address this in a very proactive way. The programme allowed us to seek out and pursue individuals we saw as very real sources of talent, and subsequently offer them a place at Switch as an intern. They were provided with a salary during their time with us - jointly funded by the SETA and our agency. In this way we were able to provide them with the essential skills and insight they needed to become successful in the industry. They were also critically given a taste of the advertising and design environment; coming to recognise and appreciate how we work, the pressure, the expectations and, ultimately, the job satisfaction this profession offers.

Best feature: it worked

Perhaps the best feature of the MAPPP SETA internship programme, however, was that it worked. Our involvement over the past two years has allowed us to effectively introduce four new sources of transformation talent into the larger advertising and design skills pool, with three of these interns now being permanently employed at Switch.

Our extreme disappointment at the MAPPP SETA's recent decision to forego the internship programme this year is therefore based on our and other agencies' success stories. SETA mismanagement - no matter at what level - cannot and should not be allowed to effectively halt the provision of opportunities to develop talent within the industry. We simply can't afford to sideline transformative talent in 2008, based on the irresponsible decisions of certain individuals. Within Switch alone, we've been able to identify five potential internship positions that would be available this year - which translate into five lost opportunities without the requisite government support.

While industry remains committed to skills development, the Switch Group is therefore urging the MAPPP SETA to continue doing the exceptional job it has done over the past two years and resume its internship programme. Despite the industry wanting to transform and develop skills, agencies cannot be expected to shoulder this huge responsibility alone. SETA support remains critical. Without it, inspiring a new generation of talent that will both appeal to and truly represent South Africa's rainbow nation looks set to remain a vision as opposed to a reality for a long time to come.