Audrey D’Angelo
The training given to young people attending some further education and training (FET) colleges as part of a national programme does not enable them to obtain jobs in industry, according to Sean Jones, a director of Ikhaya Fundisa Techniskills Academy, a black-owned artisan training company specialising in the mining industry.
This, he said, was because trainers lacked practical experience in the workplace.
But Toolmaking Association of South Africa national secretary John MacEwan said this situation was changing as far as the job of toolmaking was concerned – a skill vital to the production of machinery and other equipment.
He said 650 young people, the first intake, were in the first and second year of a four-year course in toolmaking endorsed by the association. The first of these would qualify in 2014.
The course was set up as a result of concerns by the association and senior executives in engineering firms about the loss of experienced toolmakers because of emigration and a lack of effective training for others to succeed them.
MacEwan explained yesterday that, apart from the effects of emigration, the average age of toolmakers in the country was 55 and there was a dire shortage of others to replace them when they retired. “We want to stay ahead of the retirement situation.”
A national toolmaking initiative had been set up with funding from the Department of Trade and Industry. “In the Western Cape alone we shall need at least 55 newly qualified toolmakers a year”, he said.
The toolmaking training scheme has had input from the engineering industry, but this is not the case at many FET colleges.
Warning that many students at FETs were unable to find work when they left, Jones said: “Unfortunately many FETs are sub-standard and when a student leaves with a qualification it is not trusted by businesses out there in the real world. Image-wise, the qualifications don’t carry with them enough value, because the market place generally doubts the efficacy of certain FETs.”
He said one of the problems was is that a large proportion of trainers lacked the relevant hands-on experience to train people properly.
“We have witnessed cases where an institution has all the necessary equipment to train learners, but lecturers don’t really know how to operate this equipment. So, while the necessary funds are being allocated to the institutions, in many cases this equipment is standing idle.
“This means we need to take a look at the successful institutions, and note just why they are successful, and then get the others to emulate them. But we know, as industry players, that there might first need to be some ‘training of the trainers’ taking place, coupled with extensive hand-holding by (the) industry,” Jones said.