South Africa is caught in a vice of two crises: a skills shortage and an economy that is deindustrialising and dying. 

The situation is not helped by the fact that only 6% of our school starters get a university degree within six years of leaving school – if they even get past the doors: in 2023 there was only room for 210,000 matriculants of the 897,775 who passed.

The question is often asked: are they even fit for further learning? 

The Class of 2023 recorded an 82.9% pass rate, the highest since the advent of democracy 30 years ago, but only 40.9% of them (282,894) qualified for university entrance. 

Perhaps the question should be, are our universities fit to teach them?

We live in a world that is dramatically different from the one for which these institutions of higher learning seem to believe they are preparing their students. 

There is real concern about the shelf life of qualifications.

Traditionally, qualifications took 15 to 20 years for those skills learnt at university to become obsolete – today, that has perhaps been cut to between two and five years. 

The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2023 says that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. We are in a race to obsolescence.

Knowledge and skills are only part of the answer; more essentially, we need cognitive development that leads to a sophistication of thinking, managing and doing. And that is harder to teach and learn, which is why quality of education is critical to success. 

It’s no good having a weak primary education sector and a few strong universities. The whole system needs to work if South Africa is to work.

We can see this in our country’s economic performance. Once a beacon of industrialisation for the continent (albeit based on deep inequality), South Africa has been steadily deindustrialising while sadly retaining its inequalities.

All this while countries that were once – almost incredibly – economically subordinate to us have radically diversified their economies. 

Vietnam, Finland, Korea and Singapore have made education at the heart of their successes, which has created the necessary skill sets vital for a transition to an agile, diversified knowledge-based economy, unlike ours which remains stuck on an increasingly superannuated and shrinking commodities sector.

South Africa carries the cross of unemployment, which at 33% (officially) towards the end of last year, is the highest in the world according to the World Bank, but it is the time bomb of youth unemployment that could truly crucify our country and its aspirations to be the leading economy and society in Africa.

Of those who do have work, very few have degrees and are trapped in low- to mid-level jobs. But they are the ones who offer us the key to our salvation.

While there is an essential focus on young students, arguably there is a blind spot in unlocking the potential in the very people who can make an immediate difference where they work and while they work. 

It is this invisible cohort of the underqualified middle, who had no chance to go to university, that keeps the economy turning and which needs to be taught how to lead and how to leverage their hard-won experience. 

The school leavers can learn the technical skills, but the experienced workers need to be taught how to manage them to succeed in complex work situations.

In a world of increasing Vuca (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) or Rupt (Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical, Tangled) we need to develop degree programmes that enhance the ability to think, which is a skill that has come into even sharper importance with the advent of fake news and artificial intelligence.

We can’t build economies on the backs of accountants and lawyers – or doctors for that matter. We need engineers in all the different disciplines to build and develop the new systems, and we need real managers to lead them and build successful businesses.

Great entrepreneurs

And as much as we need great managers and business executives, we need great entrepreneurs – and we have many of them right under our noses. 

A third of the South African respondents to a Henley White Paper on the subject admitted they are already side hustling. And far from harming their main job, they are overwhelmingly loyal and even more hardworking than their peers who do not do this. They also bring new skills into their primary work.

There is a far higher potential for businesses like these to succeed, as opposed to first-time entrepreneurs, and yet we continue to focus on the neophyte – fostering youth entrepreneurism and helping them to draw up business plans and access funding, only for them to fail because they have no experience in running a business.

Side hustling is a real entrepreneurial incubator for viable micro-enterprises that can grow and create jobs as they scale, and an exit pipeline for older managers who can then be replaced by younger managers in the organisation, creating a much-needed dynamism and agility without the attendant risk of losing institutional knowledge.

We need to return to the basics of education in the workplace. 

Ever since the days of Hippocrates, the medical profession has used a system of see one, do one, teach one – institutionalised workplace learning and mentorships that pass on knowledge in real-time and real-life immersive situations.

We need to rediscover and expand the odyssey from apprentice to journeyman and then master of the craft in all sectors, not just the construction site.

In training managers, we must not lose sight of their personal development as it all starts with “know thyself”. We need to create leaders who instinctively understand they might not have the answer and seek advice. 

It’s time to debunk the HIPPO – the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. There’s an intellectual bravery in seeking out the most expertise in the room, regardless of rank.

The old African adage tells us if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

We are a diverse society, a nation forged from the amalgam of difference, and our business leaders need to unlock our potential by understanding diversity and harnessing it.

The old South Africa’s wealth was built on an extractive economy with a few highly skilled people and a deliberately undereducated mass population that provided mostly labour.

The new South Africa needs to give masses of people the ability to create a modern prosperity by working at higher levels of sophistication and complexity, and only mass education and workplace learning can provide that.

We don’t have any option: 25% of the jobs that we have now are destined to go the way of the blacksmith and the lamplighter in the next five years; some say that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2035 haven’t even been invented yet. 

The change is all pervasive and unstoppable, but our education system is stuck on serving a derivative economy that had its heyday 60 years ago.

This is the brave new world, one where we learn, unlearn and relearn. 

If we can develop leaders through a pathway of being excellent managers who can successfully navigate this, then we truly will have laid the foundations to create a better life for all. DM