Can changing the digital skills market tackle youth unemployment in South Africa?

How Spring Impact supported Collective_X to focus on addressing the system barriers behind South Africa’s digital skills crisis and youth unemployment.

Strategy| Organisational design | South Africa | Youth unemployment

South Africa faces a stark paradox: the youth unemployment rate stands at 55% (with nearly 5 million young people unemployed), while a rapidly growing tech sector can’t find the talent it needs locally – despite significant national investment in training provision.

Collective_X is a non-profit organisation working to close that gap, by reshaping the labour market for entry-level ICT-skilled young people in South Africa, aiming to catalyse 500,000 entry-level ICT jobs, and to make South Africa a global destination for ICT global business services.

Spring Impact worked with their team to build the organisational strategy and capabilities needed to address the system barriers blocking progress.

Challenge

South Africa’s skills system rewards training that does not lead to employment:

The national funding framework for skills development in South Africa (across both state and the private sector) incentivises training that doesn’t meet business needs at the right time or cost
Young people end up undertaking expensive and time-consuming ICT qualifications, but remain unemployable
Training providers struggle to adapt to rapidly changing employer needs, and face no incentive to improve their offering, as the skills funding framework enables them to get paid regardless of employment results
Employers respond by turning to global labour markets to source skills, leaving young South Africans locked out of opportunities at their doorstep, and limiting the likelihood of growth in the tech sector or ICT-related global business services offerings in the country

MAKING ENTRY-LEVEL ICT SKILLS A PRIORITY

Collective_X’s mission affects all participants in the market. In their first two years of operations, they tested various interventions that might plug the existing gaps or incentivise change – from improving candidate readiness and testing results-based skills funding through a Digital Skills Impact Fund, to building platforms that connect supply and demand.

They partnered with business and government to understand all the challenges preventing training from translating into real jobs, elevating the growth and success of the entry-level ICT skills market to a national priority.

With a clear understanding of the market, and an established seat at the national table, Collective_X needed to build a scale strategy that set their organisational direction for the next 5 years, and made the best use of their resources.

“Spring Impact helped us move from programme delivery to shaping the ecosystem. It gave us the clarity and organisational structure to focus our efforts on unlocking digital jobs for young South Africans at scale.”

— Evan Jones, CEO, Collective_X

OUR APPROACH

We supported the team to:

Clarify Collective_X’s role as market changers: Develop an organisational strategy that clarified their role as market changers, identifying the key barriers to a fully functioning, thriving and competitive entry- level ICT skills market.

Focus limited resources on what has the highest impact potential, and can be delivered at the greatest speed to meet the urgency of the challenge. This meant:

building demonstration and advocacy capabilities to change the regulatory environment for skills funding
identifying and sharing innovative solutions with market actors
ensuring training providers understand employer needs
incentivising employers to grow their demand by reshoring jobs and hiring at an entry level.

Design their organisation to deliver on their strategy, ensuring that their leadership team and wider organisation was structured effectively, and had the right roles to achieve their objectives

Open up what works to enable others: Codify their successful work-integrated learning solution (which trains candidates with real-life technical work delivery, supporting and managing them to work-readiness) for open source access to the market to enable replication by other providers.

OUTCOMES

Moving from incremental to exponential change: A clear shift in thinking from how to grow their organisation and capability to achieve incremental increases and proof points through the Digital Skills
Impact Fund, to how to direct their limited resources to achieve exponential change by working on the market as a whole.

An organisation ready for scale: Leadership and structures aligned to deliver the strategy effectively

Clear strategic direction: The team aligned on a shared strategy, enabling recruitment and structuring of hugely talented staff into the right roles

An open-source asset for the sector: The Collective_X work-integrated learning solution is now open to the market, enabling replication by other providers

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