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SA faces many challenges in respect of both training and employment. Organisations like Impactful powered by LRMG offer courses and continuous skills development approaches that help the youth to both obtain and retain employment.
South Africa has a large youth population. However, its youth unemployment figure – the share of the labour force aged 15-24 – that sits at around 64%. Clearly, we need to equip young people with relevant digital skills to improve their employability.
Impactful powered by LRMG recognises the importance of such youth development, particularly its potential impact on unemployment, and as such, the company offers a range of certifications that can serve the purpose of continuous upskilling, creating an ongoing series of building blocks for their career paths.
According to Robert Williams, a specialist trainer at Impactful, IT skills alone are not enough. As technology evolves rapidly, professionals must continuously upskill to stay relevant.
“Anyone working in this field must keep up with emerging technologies. Without relevant skills, keeping your job becomes increasingly difficult,” he says.
“As a trainer, my advice to anyone who considers IT to be their passion or their choice of career, is to never remain still - you must be willing to learn constantly and consistently.”
Fellow trainer, Trevor Jones, agrees, noting that in a digitally transforming world, everything is changing. “Those who embrace change will succeed, while those who struggle to adapt may fall behind,” he adds.
“Remember that constant change in technology creates opportunities for businesses, but equally so for those individuals who are prepared to grow with the technology as it evolves.”
He further states: “Upskilling not only assists you to align with technology change, but also helps you in finding yourself. As training facilitators, our job is to teach the technology skills, but we view our role much larger than this. I believe it is our job also to instil in students a passion to learn. Impactful’s trainers share their passion for learning and growth, inspiring students to embrace continuous learning.”
Jones notes that inspiring this passion can be harder with online learning, which lacks face-to-face interaction. After all, passion is largely contagious and most often springs from the instructor’s own feelings about the subject.
“In fact, this is a key differentiator of our business - having people undertaking the training who encourage such passion and who drive a continuous learning agenda.”
Impactful’s training and certifications programme aims to improve lives, not just teach the latest technology skills.
Williams adds that learnerships play a vital role in helping unemployed young people enter the workforce.
“Learnerships are critical in order for them to have the opportunity to experience the working world, and to learn the discipline required to succeed. Basically, we can teach them a skill, which affords them the opportunity to obtain a learnership. This, in turn, provides them with the experience needed to help them move up the corporate ladder. And by instilling a culture of continuous learning it should mean that they keep adding skills to their set as they gain promotion.”
“One thing I can add is that attitude is extremely valuable. I have met many youngsters who may have little in the way of skills, but who have the drive to learn, and this enables them to achieve anything, through application, effort and hard work.”
“There are two areas within the latter: the first being that of engineering, which is very much product related and tied to the implementation of specific solutions, and the second being technical, in relation to programming and coding.”
“Unemployment obviously remains the crucial issue in SA, and in a digitally transforming society it has never been more important to ensure that all who can learn technical skills, do. This is vital to both their individual futures, and that of the country’s.”
Jones explains that automation may reduce lower-skilled jobs. However, demand for advanced skills will grow, bringing higher salaries.
“There is a massive advantage to this, in terms of allowing them to schedule their learning at a point that is most convenient for them. It offers similar advantages to working from home in that it reduces stress and frustration, and improves productivity.”
“These remote-type environments also expose students from differing backgrounds to one another, enabling them to learn from each other. The technology makes such engagement easy, offering additional value to the students. That said, we maintain a physical training location that can be used as required or leveraged along with technology to deliver a hybrid learning solution.”
“Ultimately, it is important to understand that, while technology evolution is inevitable, it is also agnostic to our desires – it is simply a tool. How effective it is in enabling transformation or alleviating unemployment is down to the user. And this is why our most critical advice is for people to apply themselves to their career choice, and to keep their certifications up to date – through an entity such as Impactful powered by LRMG – and adopt a continuous learning mindset. This is really the only way to ensure you will not be left behind by the ongoing technology evolution,” concludes Jones.
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