New Challenges for South African Development and Training — Linkages to Empirical Research

Abstract

With the introduction in South Africa of the Skills Development Act (1998) and the Skills Development Levies Act (1999) respectively, employer organizations are obliged to set aside a portion of their annual payroll for the internal training and development of their workforce. The function of the statutory National Skills Authority (NSA) is to implement the skills development strategy, monitor its performance and report the progress made by the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs). In the South African context, training and development has only recently received attention as a means of addressing critical personnel development initiatives. The focus is now shifting towards fast tracking skills development, which is being integrated into the overall business plan of organizations. Strategies need to be initiated to harness knowledge workers as competitive resources for the new global economy and for world-class competitiveness. This article accentuates the importance of the skills development strategy and offers a systems approach to skills development for organizations. It also highlights some empirical research and its linkages to the emerging challenges of the skills development strategy in South Africa. The article concludes with implications for skills development and training and maps the way for future research. S kills training and development programs initiated by organizations recognize the need to keep employees abreast of technological and social changes in order to sustain a competent and productive workforce. According to Cascio, 1 they provide opportunities for employees to improve their abilities, skills and potential.Anthony, Perrewe and Kacmar 2 reinforce this view, stating that every organization should ensure its skills training programs meet its human resources needs in terms of skills and competencies required. They contend that an organization should systematically determine its needs for training and development and dovetail this plan with that of the overall organizational and human resource strategy. In this way, needed skills are identified within occupational skill categories linked to organizational growth strategies. According to Hellriegel, Slocum and Woodman, 3 skill variety, task identity and task significance strongly influence the experienced meaningfulness of work.

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