Reducing youth unemployment beyond the youth wage subsidy: a study on Simtech apprentices.

Abstract

South Africa currently has the twin challenges of worsening youth unemployment and scarce skills that threatens its economic and social stability. Artisan trades are a profession that symbolises strongly this current problem. Simtech Training Institute in Durban, the study setting, currently trains artisan apprentices and facilitates their internship work placements. The problem currently faced by these Simtech apprentices was that their workplace internships were not leading to permanent employment after the two-year Youth Wage subsidy period. The objective of this study was to identify some of the critical success factors that differentiated Simtech artisan apprentices that obtained permanent employment compared to those currently unemployed. This was a cross-sectional study conducted among 51 artisan apprentices who graduated over the past three years at Simtech and were selected randomly. An online questionnaire made up primarily of Likert scale type questions was utilised to obtain the responses from the sample. Factor analysis was used to remove scale items from the independent variables that did not impact the variability sufficiently. Then the variables impacted significantly were combined and categorised. Finally, logistic regression analysis was conducted to identify success factors for permanent employment of Simtech graduates. The major finding was that internship/workplace environment had a statistically significant impact on permanent employment. A further finding was that youth work ethic had a minor impact on permanent employment status albeit not a statistically significant one. The main recommendation put forward by this dissertation was that intern host companies must improve their internship programmes greatly to unlock the mutual benefit of reduced youth unemployment and reduced skills shortages. Future research can explore the findings of this study over a larger population.