A New Era of Work: Rethinking Employment and Learning

It has become increasingly obvious that the target to create new jobs will need a significant shift in our collective thinking.

Several challenges exist: A flexible work environment during COVID has left a legacy of not wanting to work in the office. By default, this has created a complete shift in thinking for employers around what an “employee” looks like.

If you work from home, then employers don’t need offices and large-scale office infrastructure which means they don’t need cleaning staff, canteens, security and other facilities team members to support those offices. If an employer no longer sees you every day, the spontaneous projects that are so vital for innovation as colleagues collaborate may fall away, with only planned work and execution taking place.

Hiring young people and promoting from within, becomes more challenging because the employer no longer has organisational norms to drive performance and culture – and they cannot observe natural leadership, therefore they only need employees who can competently deliver their work. By rights, this means that there is less work for each person to do – because their focus can be singularly focused on the tasks assigned with no distraction from the unplanned projects and collaboration that come from spontaneity. This should increase the productivity of each person and reduce demand for the same number of people. So many companies are retrenching right now. We may not be giving this the attention it deserves.

Teaching young people is harder when teams are working remotely because there is so much that is learned through listening in, observation, and exposure. The number of opportunities for young people, in meaningful roles therefore becomes an increasing challenge.

Training programmes need to shift as less knowledge is garnered informally and formal training doesn’t adequately compensate for lack of exposure and experience, so our learning programmes need to follow pathways that include syndication and project-based application of learning back to focus groups in order to learn to apply the mind.

Through our Outplacements division, we work with companies to manage their retrenchments effectively. These services are focused on supporting organisations through the change management process, addressing the “survivor guilt” and working with the retrenched employees to access formal qualifications (for those that have work experience but have never trade-tested) and reskilling for redeployment. Active job search support and financial counselling are coupled with entrepreneurship as an option that provides an alternative to formal employment.

With the current programmes we are working on, it is significantly more difficult to find people work than we have experienced in the last 26 years, and so many companies don’t want to commit to formal jobs but have shifted to contract employees to manage fluctuating demand and diverse workforce structures. More than 60% of the programme participants we work with choose entrepreneurship and almost 80% of participants need significant financial coaching interventions to manage debt, budgeting and extraordinarily high commitments for family expenses.

So what do the solutions around retrenchment, learning, changing workplaces and shifting of the norms look like? Where does this end?

B-BBEE budgets across SED, ESD and Skills need to be allocated differently to achieve an authentic solution. We need to stop spending money on B-BBEE activities as though it is a write-off, and expect and do more.

To achieve more – the consolidation of a social strategy that says that we will authentically reconsider how we hire, who we hire, how people learn and what people do, means a structural shift in the current norms. This will require courage and bold moves. Hiring school leavers again on integrated learning pathways, that allow for 20 working-hour weeks to accommodate the same amount of time in learning pathways, will produce employable youth, with a qualification, 4 years’ work experience and earnings. This puts more people to work.

The integration of a future-world-of-work into your learning pathways focuses on building resilience and portable skills that create multidisciplinary teams that are highly adaptable. The commitment to support employees through an exit process to integrate them into alternative employment or self-employment needs an advanced level of thinking around the value that institutional knowledge holds, and how this could be captured into the future without the expectation of formal jobs.

The question “what is a job”, needs to be asked as government incentives and B-BBEE targets are centred around the formal definition of a job – which is possibly no longer relevant. There needs to be a realisation that, as Siyakha are doing with our Mine Closure and Just Energy Transition projects, the whole ecosystem needs to be evaluated for longer-term, and more strategic solutions that focus on where we are going and not where we are now.