Johannesburg - Higher Education, Science, and Innovation Deputy Minister Buti Manamela has called for accelerated investment in jobs of the future to boost the country’s ailing economy.
Manamela was speaking during his visit to the Nasrec Expo Centre, where scores of young people from the BRICS countries have been participating in the week-long BRICS Future Skills Challenge.
Hosted by the Skills Development Working Group of the BRICS Council in South Africa, the challenge has seen hundreds of young people aged between 18 and 35 pit their skills against one another to develop solutions for a range of challenges in various fields.
This year’s annual event is hosted under the theme “solving today’s problems using tomorrow’s technologies with young innovators in areas of coding, cyber security, aircraft maintenance, agri-IoT, building information modelling, data science, drone technologies, renewable energy, and robotic process automation, among other future skills.
“Future jobs will come from small, medium, and macro enterprises. It does not matter how many years young people take at university, as they can only learn in the real world of work,” he said.
Manamela commended countries such as China, Korea, and many others that have world skills centres, adding that young people should be supported to enhance their skills.
“We always say as part of the country’s development plan that 11 million jobs will come from SMMEs… I have met a lot of young people who are alumni of the World Skills Exchange, and most of them are confident, and some of them have been adopted by major companies, and they have become real ambassadors of the World Skills Exchange,” he said.
One of these young people is Tebogo Malefani, who took part in a cybersecurity challenge on Thursday.
He said being part of the exchange has been an eye-opener and has allowed him to broaden his craft as a software engineer and cybersecurity practitioner.
“Our people are vulnerable to cyber attacks, and we need to help them understand the value of cyber security. Being part of the BRICS Future Skills Challenge has helped me a lot, as I have been exposed to how the Chinese approach cyber security and how advanced their systems are. If we could be as good as China or be 20% as good as they are, we could go far as a country as they have perfected the craft,” Malefani told The Star.
A panel of experts from across the BRICS countries has been assigned to different skill areas to develop and mentor the participants.
Mapule Ncanywa, chairperson of the BRICS Business Council Skills Group, said the rationale behind the BRICS Skills Challenge is to tackle skills development challenges facing BRICS partner countries through benchmarking of emerging and future skills and developing standards that are tested in a public skills challenge.
“The BRICS Skills Challenge serves as a platform to collate and provide insights into how the BRICS partners continue to enable businesses by helping them respond to new and emerging skills. It will also enable the participants to help solve critical challenges using their technical skills in the thematic areas of water, energy, and health,” she said.
The Star