Bridging the Gap: Brics Future Skills Project Aims to Address Youth Unemployment Through Future Job Training

 Sherry Donaldson, project director at Bricks, a future skills is here to try to answer that question. Sherry, thanks for your time. Let's begin perhaps with, before we talk about your guys' ideas, let's just begin about what you have found out about that mismatch between output from the schools and the intake into the world of work. So I think, thank you for having me, Godfrey. I think that it's really important that we understand, I mean, those numbers are replicated in South Africa. We have about 1 million kids leaving the school system every year. And, you know, we all know our very sad unemployment statistics. But at the same time, we also know there are a lot of jobs that go unfold. And that's really because of mismatches in what young people are studying, what they're being taught, and what business actually needs. So really, this project is about trying to anticipate what business is going to need. So we can be a little bit more proactive and figure out what those future skills are and train young people up in those future skills. So as in when business is ready for them, they can be absorbed or start their own businesses, which is just as important in South Africa. I agree, I agree. And I think the scale of the challenge is illustrated by the fact that those figures are historical. What we're talking about now may well be completely different in terms of their ability to offer the work environment to take those kids in and give them something to do or enable them to create their jobs, as you say. So let's talk about your project. Okay. So it's called Bricks Future Skills. Bricks as in the... Brzeul Rache in the China South Africa, yeah. Fantastic. So underneath, in the structures of Bricks, there's something called Bricks Business Council. And the objective of Business Council is to increase trade and investment between the five partners. In each in Business Council, there is a structure of nine working groups of which skills is one. And our mandate is to try and support the eight other working groups in their objective of increasing trade and investment. Obviously, trade and investment doesn't happen if you don't have the right people and if you don't have the right skills. I agree. As the Bricks Skills Working Groups are not only South Africa, we've been running these Bricks Future Skills projects started in 2017. And we've been through quite a few iterations of this project. And every year, it takes on a slightly different flavor depending on whose current share of Bricks. In this case, this year, China, moving to South Africa, next year in 2023. But our objective is, as I said, to try and create awareness around what these future skills are going to be. And we have a project called the Atlas of Future Jobs, or Atlas of Emerging Jobs to try and create that awareness and that understanding. And that's like trying to predict the future of what's coming our way. And then we have the Bricks Future Skills Challenge, which is around trying to leverage the work that we do across the five countries to improve our levels of young people, improve our standards, and feed that ultimately our desires to feed that back into curriculum and training. So we can benchmark ourselves against our partners and feed that back into the education system. Yeah. I want to try and ask this question on behalf of someone who's listening to you and who is thinking, how do I get involved? Okay. So we have already, our Bricks Future Skills Challenge is actually happening the first week of November. So we have already selected participants for this. But we do have a website, which is BricksFutureSkills.co.ca. And there's quite a lot of information on that. And there's also some contact emails, info at Bricks Future Skills, I think is one of them. And people can get hold of us like that. But I think for people to follow us and to understand what we're doing, because we're going to go through a very similar process next year when we are hosting and we're going to have to run our own Future Skills Challenge. And hopefully we're looking for sponsorship and funding. So hopefully we can run and get a lot more than 17 skills for South Africa next year. In addition to that, we're also running an iteration of the Atlas project in the FoodBerve Manufacturing sector, which is funded by the FoodBerve CETA. And we're always looking for additional support and additional projects in that space as well. So our big kind of dream is to have a South African Atlas Survey Emerging Jobs, an African Atlas Survey Emerging Jobs, so that we can then as a continent come together, create the right skills, develop the right curricula. But that is curricula that is kind of Bricks level and world class standard or Bricks standard and minimum. In fact, often that's better than the rest of the world. And allow movement of people, allow skills to work remotely or wherever they need to. And leverage our Bricks partners with the work that they do. They're doing some phenomenal work in some of our partners. For sure. You cannot miss out that visitor that you seem to have at your feet. Welcome to another conversation. A very demanding visitor. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I wanted to know, so we're doing our bit by the way, by giving you the platform to talk about the work that you do and the support that you require. I see you have identified a number of things that are changing the work environment and the business environment that we need to look at. When you look at those risks from your changing technology to obviously the changing skills that are required, I wanted to know which one your rank perhaps is the most challenging in respect to the countries that we're talking about within the Bricks groupings. I think that's a really hard question. So I think every country has its own dynamics. But I suppose if you had to group them, it would be, if you look at all the list of the future skills that we're participating in, majority of them are related to digital skills of some sort. So whether it's drone operations, which is program, whether it's digital twin, which is setting up a copy of a factory so you can monitor and manage it remotely, whether it's robotic process automation, all of those things require digital skill. I think the biggest barrier in South Africa is around data and connectivity, allowing access into, there's a huge number of free courses available, a lot of the service providers, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, all of those guys, all have free courses, but allowing access to that, you need data to be able to access that stuff. So I think that's a huge barrier in South Africa and to just generally developing robotic skills. We are making progress, we've introduced coding, robotics, those kind of things, but we need much more still. Yeah, we're certainly going to come to you and talk about that Atlas. I'd love to look at it and see what it looks like. This is an ongoing conversation even for us as well because I remember last week we also had guests who were talking about trying to find the right skills and then enabling people to get into the fastest growing sectors of the economy. And as we all know, we hear a lot about FinTech and you certainly have been speaking to that, we'll look forward to inviting you back and chatting about those things. Sherry, thanks for joining us this afternoon. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you Sherry. Sherry is a project director at Bricks Future Skills.

CNBC Africa’s Godfrey Mutizwa spoke with Sherrie Donaldson, Project Director at BRICS Future Skills for more. 

This Brics initiavie aims to upskill today’s youth for future jobs

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This Brics initiavie aims to upskill today’s youth for future jobs

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