SKILLS DEVELOPMENT THE KEY TO GROWTH

This was Thursday's post.

Whilst I agree with this on some levels, it is also an area of concern. The SMME sector are the ones who are supposed to grow the economy. By their very nature, they are one man/woman establishments and they then grow by 50% when they hire a staff member. It is ridiculous to expect them to hire staff member 'A' who is supposed to be efficient in 'xyz' only to discover that the staff member has a basic knowledge of only 'x'! The SMME is then supposed to either hire someone else (in order to get the work done and meet his/her deliverables) and/or send said staff member on a training course to become proficient in "x, as well y & z" and then pick up the slack (which he hired the staff member for in the first place), whilst they are off being trained! To add insult to injury, said staff member is earning the salary of someone who is supposed to be proficient in "x,y & z" as that is what they were hired for in the first place!

In all of this, said SMME, also has to contend with all of the compliance and red tape issues that Government have imposed and still conduct a viable business!

Doesn't make much sense to me at all!

Skills development the key to growth

If staff are inefficient you need more people to do the job
Workplace staff

20 March 2007 at 06h00

There is a tragic paradox about the South African employment scene: massive unemployment and, at the same time, a massive skills shortage. Official unemployment in South Africa is running at between 27 percent and 40 percent and yet businesses say they battle to find appropriate staff to fulfill their needs.

Liza van Wyk is chief executive of BizTech, a company that provides bridging for graduates who are battling to apply university theory to workday practice, and mid-level employees who want to progress in their career. She points out that they experience this problem in their own business. "We could certainly grow faster if we could find the right people," she says, "but recruiting them is a real problem."

In 2004, Stats SA reported that of the 40,4 percent unemployed, 60 000 were graduates. Many companies or business associations, including the Institute of Chartered Accountants, complain that many degrees have scant value - students may understand the theory but don't always know how to apply it, their social skills and English capacity are often marginal. Gauteng's premier Mbhazima Shilowa, in October last year, quoted a newspaper report which indicated that "50 percent of South Africa's undergraduate students fail to complete their degrees and only 30 percent obtain their qualifications within five years of enrolling as first year students". "The sector education and training authorities (Setas) have failed to respond adequately to the challenge of skills development," he says.

Van Wyk says it is better to employ someone who meets most, even if not all needs, and train them. "People are more likely to stay with a company that they know is interested in their development." The world is progressing so fast with globalisation that ongoing learning is essential just to keep up, Van Wyk believes. "Take Ireland, which has grown from being a nation severely in debt 20 years ago, to the world's second richest country now, as an example," she says.

"Ireland announced on March 6 that a million of its work force - and it is a country with a population of 4,5-million people - have to double their skills in the next five years for it to remain competitive."If a country doing that well places such a high demand on top-level skills, then we cannot afford to lag behind." Van Wyk believes a failure to train staff and boost efficiencies affects overall resource costing - if staff are not doing things efficiently you need more staff to do the job.

She says they began planning BizTech a year ago when the parent company Astro Tech - which caters for executive and senior staff - ran a training course for "High Performance PAs and administrators". "We couldn't, and still can't, keep up with the demand for that course. We began researching the market and realised that mid-level employees are the heart of an organisation. If you send an executive to training but he is not backed by highly skilled support staff, his or her best efforts are reduced."We also realised that there is often poor appreciation by bosses of the high-level skills needed for tasks they often give to people which impact on the image of the company. "Staff with little or no training battle to make the grade, or money is wasted by bringing in high-priced consultants." Events planning, designing invitations and advertisements were some of the skills that were poorly appreciated by executives but had high impact on the company image."

At present, many PAs and office administrators are helping their managers put together budgets for projects. It is they who handle expense accounts, the petty cash and credit cards," Van Wyk points out. "It is an area fraught with risk if there is fraud or someone who does not know how to balance the books." As a result, one of the courses run Biztech is Finance and Budgeting for PA's. "We are living in the knowledge era and in a highly competitive world, life-long learning is essential to the individual and any corporate that wants to stay ahead," Van Wyk concludes.

Liza van Wyk can be contacted on 011-453-5291. You can also visit the Biztech website at www.biztech.co.za