We Cannot Ask Twelve Months to Repair Eighteen Years

We Cannot Ask Twelve Months to Repair Eighteen Years

A learnership and absorption is not the finish line. It is just the starting point.

Anton Visser, COO of SA Business School reflects on why a learnership is only the beginning of the work needed to stem SA’s youth unemployment crisis...

We are one of South Africa’s top learning and development providers. Learnerships, skills programmes, and workplace readiness training are what we do, and we believe deeply in their power to change the trajectory of a young person's life.

So, it may seem strange that we want to begin with an admission rather than a promise.

Learnerships, on their own, cannot solve South Africa's youth unemployment crisis.

Neither can workplace readiness training, as valuable as it is.

Neither can a degree or a diploma for that matter.

We say this not to diminish the work we do every day, but because we have come to understand that this is simply the starting point, a deeply important one, but on its own it is not the solution.

And pretending otherwise serves no young person and no business that employs them.

The Scale of the Challenge

The scale of the challenge is well known to anyone who reads the quarterly employment figures.

In early 2026, Stats SA reported unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds at almost 61%, with more than a third of that age group not in employment, education, or training of any kind.

Behind those percentages sits something the numbers cannot capture: nearly four million young people who have stopped looking for work altogether, not because they are unwilling, but because they no longer believe a job exists for them.

It is tempting, in business circles, to translate that disbelief into a story about attitude.

We hear it often.

The young people will not show up.

They expect to be rewarded simply for arriving.

They lack the work ethic of an earlier generation.

We understand the frustration that produces these comments, and we have seen the moments that give rise to them.

But we ask that everyone in our sector resist the simplistic, easy explanation, because it is both unfair and unhelpful, and because it points us toward the one intervention guaranteed to fail: telling a struggling young person to try harder.

Looking Beyond Assumptions

Here is what we see instead when we look closely at so many of the learners who come through our programmes…

For a great many of them, the whole of life so far has been an exercise in survival.

Family structures that fractured early.

An education system that failed them long before any employer had the chance to.

The unrelenting mental tax of living hand to mouth, where every day is a negotiation with scarcity.

None of this leaves a person unchanged.

The research on childhood adversity proves that sustained stress in the developing years shapes the very capacities that the workplace later demands, from the ability to plan ahead and regulate emotion, to the empathy and accountability needed to work as team members, to the simple willingness to trust that effort will actually be met with reward.

What an employer reads as a poor attitude is very often the long shadow of a childhood spent in difficulty and adversity.

Why Learnerships Are Only the Beginning

This is the truth at the centre of what we have learned.

By the time a young person arrives at our training facilities and classrooms at the age of twenty or twenty-two, we are working with a lifetime of accumulated experience, much of it marked by hardship, and we are asking a twelve-month programme to do what an entire childhood was meant to do over a far longer time.

So can a learnership, paired with both theoretical and practical workplace readiness training, and soft skills training repair all that?

Honestly, it’s only the start, and the moment learners and employers accept this, is the moment we start designing for the success that needs to rise on the foundation of a solid learnership qualification.

Opening Doors to Opportunity

What a good learnership programme does, and does well, is open a door that would otherwise stay shut.

It gives a young person a real qualification and, just as importantly, real experience inside a working environment.

When it is built around a genuine commitment to absorption, it offers something this generation has rarely been given: credible evidence that effort here will actually lead somewhere.

That evidence matters more than any training module.

Proving that the path is real, that the job at the end is not a mirage and that there is real room for career development and progress, is the most powerful thing we can do.

The Critical Role of Employers

The corporates who sponsor and absorb our learners are not bystanders in this story.

They are its protagonists.

Without their willingness to fund these programmes and, crucially, to take young people onto their payrolls, none of this exists.

We hold that partnership in the highest regard.

Because absorption, the moment a learner becomes an employee, is not the end of the journey.

It is the beginning of the most important part.

What Happens After Absorption Matters Most

The day a young person walks into a business as a permanent member of staff is the day the real developmental work begins, not the day it concludes.

The qualification is in hand.

The confidence is still being built.

The old patterns, formed over those years growing up in the face of constant adversity and hardship, do not dissolve on signing an employment contract.

They surface in the first difficult weeks, the first piece of hard feedback, the first time the work feels overwhelming, and an old instinct says to withdraw.

This is precisely the point at which the employer’s investment into further mentorship and coaching within the workplace become the whole game.

Absorption, or employability is often reduced to getting a job at the end of a learnership, but in reality, it is so much more than that.

It is about helping learners build the confidence, capability and skills to build their careers over time, to understand how the skills they gained actually translate into their work and futures, and to adapt and respond to change.

That is what rebuilds a young person's belief in their own future, and it cannot be delivered in twelve months and then switched off the day they are absorbed.

It has to continue in the workplace, with all our support alongside it.

A Shared Mission

As SA Business School, we will keep building the learnerships, skills programmes, the mentorship, coaching and the workplace readiness training that carries a young person through the fragile early period of absorption and employment, and we will keep walking with our learners well past the point where the formal learnership ends.

And we know that our corporate partners will join us in seeing absorption as the start of a shared mission.

Where a learner joins your business, you are receiving a person of enormous potential who is still, in the most important sense, in the early chapters of their development.

The training and mentorship that began with us on a learnership programme, must continue in the workplace.

This is the most worthwhile and important work there is in tackling our youth employment crisis and the returns are real, in loyalty, in capability, and in the slow rebuilding of a generation's faith that their effort, commitment and accountability is absolutely worth it.

Beyond Certificates and Compliance

We will not solve South Africa's youth employment crisis with a certificate alone, nor with ticking checkboxes on a BBBEE scorecard.

We will solve it by refusing to mistake the opening of a door for the completion of a journey.

The learnership gets a young person to the threshold.

What we choose to do together as training providers and employers once they cross it is what will define whether this generation rises or remains where we left off.