Addressing 40.6% Youth Unemployment by Expanding Creative Industry Access

SEM's Eden Marais explores the role businesses and the creative industry can play in creating meaningful pathways for young talent. (Image supplied)

We continue to produce world-class creative talent, shaping global movements across music, film, and digital culture.

Yet the pipeline from that raw talent into the industry remains unnecessarily narrow, and the cost of maintaining that narrowness is beginning to show up in the work itself.

Youth unemployment sits at 40.6% for people aged 25 to 34, according to Stats SA's 2026 figures.

Conversations with our industry stakeholders reveal a consistent tension: employers struggle to find capable production staff, yet stipends average around R2,000 and entry-level roles routinely require two to four years of prior experience.

A generation of skilled young creatives is being held back less by ability or enthusiasm than by structures that have not yet been designed with them in mind.

The question worth sitting with is not just "can I afford to bring on a junior?" It's "what does the industry look like in ten years if businesses like mine keep deferring this decision?"

What young creatives actually bring

The value case for junior talent is often framed around cost. It shouldn't be.

Young creatives are often shaping digital culture before it surfaces in a trend deck, which makes them unusually well-positioned to inform the strategies built around it. They bring context, community knowledge, and a point of view shaped by actually living the culture your brand is trying to reach.

Beyond cultural intelligence, there's the compounding value of genuine development. Junior staff who are given real ownership of work, not just tasks, build institutional knowledge, creative voice, and loyalty over time. They ask questions that expose assumptions and shift team dynamics in ways that produce better thinking.

What gets lost when we don't pass It down

The risk of exclusion runs deeper than any single company's hiring decisions. When skill transfer stops, when mentorship gives way to extraction, the gap doesn't just persist; it widens with each cycle.

A creative sector that fails to cultivate its next generation doesn't simply stagnate; it calcifies, producing work that draws from an increasingly shallow pool and a professional class that self-selects along lines of background and connection rather than ability.

The NFVF's Skills Audit has already named this as a present condition, not a warning about what might come.

Practical entry points already exist

The infrastructure for meaningful youth development already exists, and it is more accessible than most businesses realise.

The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), amongst others, funds grants for training providers annually, while iKasi Media combines NQF-accredited training with paid placements specifically designed to bring capable young people into the industry through routes beyond the traditional pipeline.

The SA Film Academy offers structured on-set training with a visible progression from junior to senior roles.

Together, these programmes represent a growing ecosystem of support that allows businesses to invest in young talent without shouldering the full weight of that development alone.

For companies willing to engage with what's already available, the path to bringing young creatives into the fold becomes considerably less complicated than it might first appear. Investing in emerging talent with genuine intention remains one of the few moves that builds your team, your reputation, and your industry at the same time.

What meaningful inclusion actually looks like

Real liveable compensation is a starting point, and a necessary one, but the more enduring investment happens in the day-to-day structures of how work gets shared and knowledge gets passed on.

Mentorship that gives young creatives genuine ownership of projects, rather than proximity to them, is what accelerates development.

Bringing junior voices into the strategy conversation, rather than reserving them for the execution phase, is what produces creative cultures with actual depth.

Organisations that build these habits deliberately are the ones whose institutional knowledge compounds rather than walks out the door.

Fifty years later, Youth Day 2026 is as good a moment as any to decide what your business actually stands for when it comes to the next generation.

Our young creatives are already producing work of consequence. The opportunity for businesses is to be the environment where that energy gets direction, investment, and room to develop into something lasting.

Industries that remain relevant do so because someone, at some point, chose to bring the next generation into the room.