Uncompeting for impact: What South Africa’s skills crisis demands of us
6 min read
As South Africa commemorates the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the role that young people played in the liberation of our nation, it is also an opportunity to look at the present in which a sobering reality confronts us: Despite countless youth development initiatives and years of promises on job creation, 60.9% of South Africans aged 15 to 24 are unemployed.
This crisis is stubbornly entrenched and must raise urgent questions about what we are doing wrong in terms of creating opportunities for this generation.
A striking contradiction sits at the heart of South Africa’s skills crisis: The country urgently needs more skilled professionals, yet an estimated 165 000 graduates are unable to enter the labour market because their qualifications are being withheld over unpaid student debt.
The solutions proposed are doable and overdue: release certificates, reform funding criteria, rethink the relationship between universities and student finance, and review the student funding system.
But even if all this were done, a bigger challenge would remain. How do we ensure graduates are employable and able to transition successfully into meaningful work?
At a recent Learning and Development Conference hosted by Knowledge Resources, I encountered many professionals from the private sector doing meaningful, often groundbreaking work to address our country’s skills challenges: from innovative incubation programmes and learnerships, to in-house development initiatives and sustained coaching and mentoring for young people.
Conferences such as these play an important role in sharing knowledge, connecting key players and showcasing best practices. But as one speaker, Preesha Persad – a senior leadership, talent and performance manager – highlighted, real impact will require us to collaborate across industries and sectors, rather than compete.
Is this even possible?
Ruchika Malhotra, in her book Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success, argues that many of us have been socialised from school through to corporate life to view success as outperforming others in the race for limited opportunities, recognition or advancement. This conditioning fosters chronic comparison, overwork and externally defined measures of success.
But in a country facing vast structural unemployment and the social devastation that this is causing, this mindset is not just limiting, it is dangerous. And in sectors like skills development, where the advancement of human beings and especially the youth is our bread and butter, we must urgently unravel these mindsets and behaviours and play our part in resolving a crisis that is a time bomb.
Addressing youth unemployment will not be achieved if organisations and key stakeholders (universities, government departments, industry bodies etc.) remain locked in cycles of comparison and competition.
Despite the many initiatives shared over the two days, what was invisible were examples of organisations actively partnering to replicate success, share learning and close gaps collectively.
Malhotra offers a pathway to achieving this: to “uncompete”. This is not about abandoning ambition or performance. It is about rejecting scarcity-driven, winner-takes-all thinking as the dominant model of success. It calls for reframing success as something shared, where the progress of the broader community matters more than individual wins.
It invites us to move away from comparison and toward contribution. To build abundant ecosystems through the generous sharing of knowledge, opportunities and lessons learnt. To redefine success in ways that lift more people, not just a select few.
What might this look like in practice for youth development in South Africa?
- A consortium of organisations within a region sharing responsibility for upskilling and absorbing young talent into the workforce. This group could be convened by tertiary education institutions or even schools.
- Multi-stakeholder forums that look at equipping the future leaders of a particular region. This could be convened by a local Chamber of Commerce or business forum.
- The pooling of resources across sectors to increase the scale and reach of skills development initiatives. This should be a key deliverable for the above groups.
- Practitioners in the skills development space openly sharing what didn’t work, so that others can learn faster and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
In practice, this will require more than good intentions. It will require new ways of engaging, clearer frameworks for collaboration and a willingness to redefine what success looks like, placing young people at the centre of it all.
It also calls for different questions: What does success truly mean in the context of youth empowerment? What kind of future workforce and society are we trying to build? And, as community development author Peter Block suggests, what are we willing to do to create a future distinct from the past?
In this context, skills development conferences, expos and online learning & development opportunities must become more than spaces for sharing and networking. They must become platforms for co-creation; spaces where collective thinking translates into collective action and conversations shift from showcasing success to building it together.
Meaningful work is happening, but the scale of our challenge demands more of us all.
Taegan Devar
Industrial Psychologist
Founder & Managing Director
