The quality of Further Education and Training (FET) graduates was only as good as the willingness of local business to open up its workplaces, Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande said yesterday.
The private sector needed a change of mindset and to think about capacitating the workforce, he said.
While the FET college system varies widely in quality, criticism of the sector in some quarters over the employability and cost of training graduates has raised questions about the colleges' ability to respond to the challenge of a skills shortage and high youth unemployment.
Speaking at a New Age business briefing, Nzimande - who said the outcomes in the sector were improving - dismissed the idea that graduate quality remained a major impediment to employability, saying even those with minimum skills requirements for jobs often struggled to find employment.
It was more important to ensure that FET students were assured of work, and this would entail business opening up workplaces for the training of graduates, even if it did not ultimately employ them.
This was in business's best interest in the long term, and business could not simply focus on end-of-year financial results, he said.
Nzimande said sector education and training authorities (Setas) were "ideally placed" to find work placement for graduates, although he acknowledged that the government did not have "reliable skills data" on shortages of skills in all of the country's economic sectors.
This came as the Democratic Alliance yesterday presented is own plan to tackle "SA's most urgent challenge", youth unemployment, as part of the presentation of its Jobs and Growth strategy.
Source: Business Day via I-NET Bridge
