In meeting our national objectives of accelerated growth and development, our skills development strategies need to focus on five key skills, writes Tshilidzi Marwala.
One of South Africa's strategic intentions is to stimulate economic growth through the consolidation of essential and strategic skills. This is expected to ensure that South Africa radically develops new industries, consolidates productive forces and acquires new skills. In executing this revolutionary goal, government has prioritised skills development to drastically increase South Africa's productive capacity. The government in partnership with private sector has initiated various skills development programmes. These programmes have played a major role in pursuing the economic and social integration of the second economy into the mainstream economy. For these goals to become a reality it is important that all these strategies and tactics are interlinked with the reality of South Africa's economic landscape and that these goals are aimed at not only achieving the necessary skills but also sufficient skills for the attainment of rapid economic growth. To achieve these goals it is important to understand the skills development life cycle.
The skills development life cycle can be viewed as an interaction between society, the educational system and industry. Society supplies the necessary people to the educational system who are then educated for industry that trains them for specific skills. This entire process takes on average 15 years to complete. These 15 years involve primary, secondary and tertiary education. This implies that any skills development process that is not planned at least 15 years in advance will not be able to solve the deep underlying problem of underdevelopment. Thus the strategies and tactics that ought to be deployed must be revolutionary, dynamic and adaptive in nature, and must have a life cycle of at least 15 years. One of the most challenging scientific management processes today is that of formulating strategies and tactics with long life cycles. The fact that the global economic landscape is by nature dynamically unstable and thus uncertain makes the process even more daunting.
Necessary Skills The point of departure in attempting to solve this problem is to answer the question: What are the necessary skills that one would need in the next 15 years? In this article we have identified five key skills needed to revolutionise South Africa's economy:
These skills would solve current problems but also put South Africa in a position where it can deal with all future challenges.
Intellectual skill is the ability to use scientific ways of inquiry to reach conclusions, whether social, political, economic or otherwise, by the use of logic and deductions. Intellectual skills would allow cadres to think outside the box, to visualise in space and time long before situations arise and be able to extract truth from facts. These skills equip cadres with mindsets that allow them to decisively deal with any challenges as they happen, irrespective of the scale or the complexity of the problems at hand.
The infrastructures that are required to develop strong intellectual skills include strong communities that put knowledge as the most advanced expression of their collective consciousness. The other infrastructure requirements are educational systems, whether primary, secondary or tertiary. Education systems ought to nurture cadres who are self-reliant, confident and view continuous learning as a necessary part of modern life and are able to synthesise information. As Karl Marx put it: 'Science is necessary because essence and appearance never directly coincide'. Indeed, if it was not because of the abundance of this skill in earlier Africans, the pyramids would never have found a physical expression.
Technical skills allow cadres to understand numeric representations, make decisions based on evidence and interpret complex geometric structures.
Technical skills may also be viewed as a derivative of the intellectual skill and are required, particularly, when dealing with short-term tactics.
The reason why technical skills may be viewed as a derivative of the intellectual skill is because it is from intellectual conclusions that technical solutions such as the discovery of cellphones were extracted. The Kingdom of Mapungubwe would never have existed unless our forbearers had technical skills in abundance. The Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA) is a tactic that is aimed at acquiring technical skills.
The infrastructures that are required to build technical skills include universities of technology. However, for these institutions to function optimally there need to be strong interactions between these institutions and places of employment, such as industry and government.
Communication skill is another skill that is often misunderstood. It is really the ability for a community to read and write as part of mainstream activity. One Japanese scholar was once asked how Japan developed so fast and his reply was that the efficiency of diffusion of ideas, was so pervasive that Japan could only develop fast. Whether this explanation is sufficient or not is a topic of another conversation, but what we can learn is that communication is a crucial skill that we ought to nurture in our communities. It was in pursuit of developing this skill that the earlier Kingdom of Timbuktu in modern-day Mali, built libraries and universities so that information can not only be stored but also be diffused to communities both at the time and for future generations.
The other skill that is extremely important is the leadership skill. Marx was quoted as stating that revolutionary leadership is the ability to make 'progression from the abstract to the concrete and vice versa'. This the ability to understand issues at both the specific and the general levels and to understand how the specific affects the general and vice versa. This skill is essential for a country that intends to take global leadership. Our movement has continually brought forward such leadership and it is the responsibility of our movement to ensure that such leadership skill is diffused to all spheres of our country's life in particular and to our continent in general. The intellectual skill is really a subset of the leadership skill because leadership that is characterised by the absence of intellectualism, whether organic or nurtured, is simply incapable of ensuring success in today's state. Leadership skill allows cadres to be innovative by always being ready to take intellectual leadership in any sphere of life.
The ability to link the abstract to the practical is what is termed social skills. It is only when knowledge benefits society that it truly becomes education. This skill is very crucial in the modernisation of societies.
Policy framework It is important to locate these skills within the policy framework that is currently in existence to identify gaps and use these to strengthen the task of skills development. To increase the levels of skills, government has adopted the National Skills Development Strategy. The main intention of this strategy is to germinate a labour force that is highly skilled and which is characterised by superior technological knowledge. It is intended that this strategy will lead to a labour force that is geared towards increasing the country's economic growth. This strategy targets key national developmental areas and is partly intended to increase the absorptive capacity by South Africa of the knowledge spill-over from foreign-owned enterprises at the microeconomic level. It specifically targets the development of technical skills. To strengthen this strategy we need to align it to the tertiary education system. On executing this strategy, delicate care should be taken to ensure that short-term goals are balanced against long-term goals.
Government, in partnership with private sector and institutions of higher learning, has initiated learnership programmes to create a large pool of skilled people to meet the demands of the growing South African economy.
These learnerships ensure that unemployed youth get on-the-job training experience through the sector education and training authorities (SETAs) and are funded by the National Skills Fund. One of the biggest challenges faced by this tactic is the ability to ensure that there is alignment in economic and political imperatives for reducing unemployment, fostering growth as well as international competitiveness. The biggest problem with this tactic is the reluctance of industry to massively participate in learnerships. As a way forward, government, industry and universities should reach a binding commitment to vastly increase learnerships and prescribe specifically that the skills discussed above are nurtured in these learnerships.
Tshilidzi Marwala is the Carl and Emily Fuchs Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand and is a member of the ANC Thomas Nkobi Branch.
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