Engineering News reports that the Department of Employment and Labour (DEL) has put a stop to the “willy-nilly” funding of skills training programmes, after some resulted in poor employment outcomes.

This was indicated by DEL Minister Thulas Nxesi on Friday at the ten-year celebrations of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Researching Education and Labour. He noted that when he started in his role as minister of the department, it was facilitating and funding training which was only minimally informed by labour market research and skills planning. “In some ways, we had a bizarre supply-led training model, with training institutions largely setting the agenda for skills training,” he noted. The “very real” downside of this approach was that, when unemployed people received training that was not aligned to the needs of the labour market, such individuals remained unemployed, Nxesi pointed out. He advised that the Unemployment Insurance Fund’s (UIF’s) Labour Activation Programme (LAP) had taken a strategic direction in which training of the unemployed would be skills demand-led, leading to employment at the end of the training period. “The employers and partners who participate in the [Training of the Unemployed] Programme commit to ensuring that the trainees will be absorbed,” said Nxesi. To thast end, he highlighted that the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, for instance, had already absorbed over 14,000 participants from one of the projects funded through the LAP.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard at Engineering News

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