PMI gears up to tackle youth unemployment
Young people need the right skills and experience to help them succeed in the rapidly changing global employment landscape, and while it’s partly up to governments to create the right conditions for this, the private sector needs to get involved.
Traditional education models, if they are even available to young people, no longer adequately prepare or more accurately don’t prepare our youth at all for the current and future working world. It is estimated that 65% of children entering primary school now, will eventually end up working in jobs that most of us can’t even begin to fathom existing.
Stats SA released the latest unemployment rate recently, citing an increase of 0.1 % to 29.1% during the third quarter of 2019. Worse still, the youth unemployment rate follows suite rising significantly to 58.2% in the third quarter of 2019 from 56.4% in the previous period. This jumps to a massive 70% counting the expanded rate including discouraged job seekers. These shocking statistics present a strong case for programmes that help to anticipate and prepare for future skills requirements.
A silver lining
Although the youth unemployment rate is staggeringly high, the graduate unemployment rate is still lower than the rate among those with other educational levels, alluding that education is still the key to improving the prospects of young people in the South African labour market.
Our Training Pillar is key to building the skills required for the future and contributing to the employability of job seekers in South Africa. Our training-business PMI have been running work readiness programmes into the Global Business Service sector to upskill South African youth in order to combat various macro issues around youth unemployment like poor literacy and numeracy skills.
Being a member of the industry body, BPeSA – who works hand in hand with the Department of Trade and Industry to drive international investment into South Africa – we see ourselves as a key partner in the execution of the sector skills strategy. It is gearing up for 50 000 new jobs over the next 5 years and PMI aims to be part of the supply chain to source, train and re-skill / up-skill this workforce to ensure global standards and make a positive impact on the youth unemployment crisis.
Making an impact
In line with our goals, PMI is attending the GBS conference today with plans to secure and partner with investors to ramp up our efforts to build the skills of the future in South Africa. Our overarching goal is to contribute to investors selecting South Africa as their investment destination of choice ultimately leading to employment opportunities and economic growth in the country.
About Adcorp
Across the Group we have a number of end-to-end workplace solutions solving a wide range of business challenges. We search, place, develop, train and manage people for temporary and permanent job opportunities. We also supply people resources on an outsourced basis and manage people-intensive processes on behalf of our clients. Our mission is to build workplaces and careers of the future by transforming the places we work in. We do this by connecting potential.