It’s the cruellest irony in South Africa’s construction sector: the more young people are “qualified”, the less they seem to be employed. Across the country you’ll find stacks of laminated certificates in households that haven’t seen an income in years – official proof that someone, somewhere, was trained. On paper, they are artisans. In reality, they are unemployed. And the system that produced them – driven by the Construction Education and Training Authority (Ceta) – shows no sign of slowing this conveyor belt of disillusionment.
We have perfected the bureaucratic ritual of certification. Students are recruited with promises of bright futures, tossed into theory-heavy programmes with outdated curriculums, and then spat out into a job market that neither knows what to do with them nor ever asked for them in the first place. The problem isn’t just a gap between training and employment. The problem is that the system seems to have institutionalised that gap, as if the mere act of issuing certificates is a form of empowerment.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about laziness or entitlement. This is about young people doing exactly what they were told. Finish school. Get into a programme. Complete the modules. Wait for your certificate. Wait longer. Still waiting. Then… nothing. No job, no placement, no pathway into industry. Instead, they’re told to celebrate their new “qualification”, while quietly joining the country’s swelling ranks of certified, qualified and utterly unemployable young people.
In Limpopo, a group of construction students recently marched on their former training centre. Their crime? Asking for job placements promised during their orientation. They had completed the full programme, passed every test and still hadn’t received a single hour of on-site experience. The provider, of course, blamed Ceta for delays in disbursement and placement logistics. Ceta, as always, pointed to “system challenges” and “funding cycles”. The students were told to be patient. Again.
The truth is this: certification without employability is not skills development – it’s false advertising.
South Africa has become dangerously comfortable with a training economy that exists in parallel to the real economy. Students move through the motions – from classroom to certificate – while the job market continues to demand experience, competence and productivity that the system does not deliver. Meanwhile, industry players are increasingly frustrated, forced to retrain “qualified” artisans at their own cost before they can be useful on-site. It’s a cycle that punishes everyone, except the institutions that administer it.
The situation is especially dire in construction. It is a sector that, in theory, should be an engine for jobs – hands-on, large-scale and infrastructure-heavy. But even as the government rolls out ambitious infrastructure budgets and rehashes old slogans about “the catalytic potential of the built environment”, the ground-level reality remains: no one is connecting the training outputs to actual job opportunities. Not at scale. Not consistently. Not with intent.
The failure is structural. There is no robust placement system linked to training. There are no enforceable requirements for post-training absorption. There are no performance metrics that track what happens to students six months after certification. In fact, many receive their certificates years after they’ve completed the course – often after they’ve already given up hope, taken up piecemeal work, or disappeared into the shadows of informal labour.
And yet, the cycle continues. Each year, Ceta reports on the number of students enrolled, trained and certified. It’s always thousands. It looks good on a dashboard. But there’s no line in the report that says: “Employed in the industry six months later.” There’s no data showing whether students earned a living wage, received further upskilling or became SMME founders. No one follows the paper trail after the ink dries on the certificate.
In townships across the country, young men and women now joke about their “wallpaper degrees” – certificates so common, so useless that they’ve become decorations in homes with no income. These aren’t failures of the students. These are failures of a system that confuses training volume with economic impact.
The consequences are deep. We are not just wasting public funds – we are eroding public trust. Every time a student is certified but not empowered, another young South African learns that the system is rigged. Another family loses faith in the promise of formal education. Another community sinks deeper into resentment and disillusionment, even as the government rolls out yet another training drive with a fancy new logo.
It’s time we called this what it is: certified unemployment. And it’s a national crisis.
The Construction Management Foundation is calling for a complete overhaul of the artisan development model. Certification must become the beginning of economic activity, not the end. Training providers should be ranked not by how many students they enroll, but by how many they place in jobs, apprenticeships or sustainable pathways. Ceta must move from counting certificates to tracking livelihoods. The industry must be incentivised – or required – to absorb trainees meaningfully. And above all, students must be treated not as outputs, but as future professionals, builders of a country still desperately in need of being built.
Until we stop measuring success by how many people we train and start asking where those people end up, the system will continue to fail – efficiently, repeatedly and at great cost. DM