By Paul West

Director: Career Advice Services

Colleagues, today I have now been with SAQA for 5-weeks, so you might call this my 5-week check-up!

When I was asked to lead the Career Advice Services initiative for SAQA, I learned that it was to be a national initiative that should be comprehensive, inclusive, multi-channel, and should strive to reach the hard-to-reach in South Africa. I also learned that it had to be affordable for everyone to access the service from wherever they are. 

When I considered what needed to be managed, I saw that there would be a staff of Helpline Career Advisers and an internal knowledge base to support them. A website would be needed to provide a self-service area for those people who use the Internet. The website would need to be integrated with all available career advice services in the country and in time, connected to SAQA and Government-owned databases.

Looking at the beneficiaries of the service, we would need to aim to reach some 10 million people. This would clearly take a range of channels of communication!

In forming an understanding of the beneficiaries of the service, I looked at the information on Gapminder (www.gapminder.com) and found that the life expectancy in South Africa had risen to about 53 years of age in recent years and that the GDP per person in the country is similar to countries like Brazil, Dominica and Grenada. The GDP per person in South Africa is higher than in China, Guyana and Egypt, and lower than in Mexico, Mauritius and Botswana.

The population of South Africa is young; about 50% of the population is under the age of 35. While having cities where the population is very concentrated, much of the population is distributed over large rural areas. The population is often under 10 people per square km in the rural areas of South Africa.

In relation to technology, about 98% of South Africans have access to a cell phone to make a telephone call. I’m told this is the highest access percentage in the world. About 4.5 million people use text messaging (SMS) and about 20% of cell phone users access the Internet via on their phones. Out of a population of approximately 49 million people, there are over 42 million cell phones.

A recent article in the Financial Mail stated that there are about 3 million people who are neither studying nor working between the ages of 18 and 24 in South Africa. In comparison, approximately 1.6 million people in the same age group are working or studying. The Government wants to increase the enrolments at Further Education and Training (FET) colleges by 600,000 people, increasing total enrolments to more than 1 million by 2014. This would leave about 2.4 million people still out of work or studies, but this number grows each year.

To make progress, we will need to truly implement the term: Multi-channel. Every available method will need to be deployed if we are to help people with their careers. Some methods envisaged are: a telephone Helpline and Social Marketing – that is content-rich messages via radio, TV and print media. We will need a self-service website where we can integrate online chat facilities (usable via the Internet and cell phones). To engage the collective energies of the broader community, we will deploy social networking or Web2.0. We will work with partners throughout the country, including institutional and organisational networks. In our work, we will be multi-lingual and strive to be sensitive to issues of gender, culture and the environment.

Establishing a service that can make a difference in as short a time as possible, will require us to link to and integrate all existing career advice initiatives we are able to find that are freely available to the broader population. We have established a national telephone Helpline. It is currently accessible via a 0860 share-call number and we will offer to return phone calls for anyone who phones us from within the country. A cell number is available to send text messages to, requesting an Advisor to phone back.  0800 numbers will be made available by the end of this year. A telephone helpline is not the only solution and has its own limitations. Our existing staffing complement of 7 Career Advisers will be increased to 20 before the end of this year and next year will be expanded to between 40 and 50 Advisers.

We needed a system to track emails being sent to partner organisations so that new management staff would be able to quickly come up-to-speed on what conversations  have been carrying on and with whom. By copying emails to this cloud service, the messages are automatically appended to the partners’ records. It will be easy for the Deputy Director who will be appointed in a few months to find the details of my current communications.

Helpline staff will need to be supported with online tools so that they can access information quickly when they are assisting learners by telephone. To facilitate this, a private MediaWiki website was created. Wiki websites can be updated by any person who has been given privileges. In the case of the SAQA Knowledge wiki as it is known, only SAQA staff may view the pages, and only they may add or change the content of the site. This method makes provision for all participating SAQA staff to be producers of knowledge rather than being only users. A Helpline staff member may update any page based on new knowledge learned or understanding gained. In some cases, knowledge-sharing sessions are being held to map out tacit information and to turn this into sharable knowledge objects.

Aggregated search facilities are being created using the freely available Google custom search engine. The first search field created was one to search all SETAs and Quality Councils. This reduces the time it takes for Helpline staff to find anything on any SETA website without being bogged down by information from the rest of the world. Similar search fields will be created for other purposes and included in the wiki and the website. Here is an example of a search for the term ‘learnerships’, which has resulted in results only from the relevant websites, and none from the rest of the world.

With the help of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), we have created an RSS newsfeed for Career Advice and education matters in South Africa. Anything published on the Internet that includes keywords such as ‘career advice’ and that include the required terms such as ‘South Africa’, ‘RSA’ or ‘ZA’ will feature in this list. The list is constantly and automatically updated as news appears. We will incorporate this into the website in due course.

SAQA already has significant databases, which can now begin to find new applications. The National Learner Records Database (NLRD) contains much information that is very useful to learners. Looking at services other countries have produced such as the Learning Directory of the UK, one can see that we already have a significant amount of the information needed to begin planning innovations such as this. By adding new data to the NLRD and building additional resources and interfaces as needed, South African will be able to boast its own Learning Directory within about 2 years.

Resources need to be brought together in a website - a super-portal. This website will include hyperlinked access to all the career advice information, tools and resources we can find in the country. It will include the aggregated search facilities to help mine information from where it is located. In 2011, we will begin working on a tool to help people build their CVs and RPL portfolios online.

The starting brief for the web developers was complex and has continued to become more complex.

We are striving to not re-invent the wheel. There are for example websites with hundreds of job and career descriptions already available, so we do not need to create these. We only need to link to them.

When we need inspiration in the development of the South African Career Advice website, we know we can look at the sites created in the UK and New Zealand. We will, however, be creating a South African website – and one aimed at the needs of the 18 to 35 age group. We will not be creating a site for another country, so we have to be focussed on our own needs.

We know that many people are looking for work in South Africa. The need for people and jobs to be aligned does not mean that we will create a job website. There are many job websites in South Africa and  we will be linking to the existing services, not re-inventing them.

We do not know yet how many people will access our website, but hope that if we provide useful links and tools, that we can touch many tens of thousands of people.

Given the popularity of Web2.0 technologies and the rapid spread of their usage in the country, we simply cannot ignore the need to provide a social networking platform.

‘Career Advice’ is already known to FaceBook, the most prolific of Web2.0 technologies. There are Career Advice FaceBook sites for Spanish -speaking job seekers in the US; there are sites to help people with ideas to build their careers; Microsoft has a FaceBook site that encourages anyone to communicate directly and publicly with them; and Tokoza community has their own FaceBook site. South Africa uses FaceBook!

There are now over 2.8 million FaceBook users in South Africa. Of these, the majority are women. 64% of South African FaceBook users are between the ages of 19 and 35!

The good news is that the Career Advice Helpline already has a FaceBook page.  We will be asking for people who have FaceBook accounts to help others via the page, and for them to help people who are not on FaceBook and perhaps not even have access to the Internet. The FaceBook page has the potential to link many of the 2.8 million FaceBook users in South Africa with others. Some of these users are people with information and can help other are people who need assistance or advice.

Through the spirit of volunteerism, could we touch another 5,000 people – or could we touch another 500,000? We will only know in the years ahead. Remember that the largest demographic in South Africa is the under 35 age group, which maps perfectly with the FaceBook profile. It is one more channel for us to use to reach people in addition to others I have already mentioned. This gives us the potential to reach more people than had we not tried it.

We will be working with all the partners who are working for the betterment of Career Advice Services in South Africa. These include NGOs, companies, universities, community centres and Government departments.

Career festivals and exhibitions will help us to touch thousands more people. We hope that through speaking with young people, distributing printed materials and providing positive examples, that we can make a positive difference.

Our relationships with the Ministries of Higher Education and Training and Labour will help us to reach over ten thousand high schools and people looking for work. Our focus needs to remain on the hard to reach, while we attempt to reach thousands more people.

The key question is how can WE do it? This will take more than a team of dedicated Career Advisers answering telephone calls. It will take more than what we can do with a website and a FaceBook site. It will take the creativity of all involved – everyone at SAQA and all the partner organisations. We will need to facilitate the technology that helps us to aggregate the required information for those people who do not have access to the latest technologies. We will need to provide ‘People enabled technologies’. South Africa needs this and we need to make it happen for the country.

There is an African proverb that says that it takes a whole village to raise a child; in our case, I am customising this to say it will take a whole village to make Career Advice happen for South Africa. Everyone involved needs to play their role.

In closing, I want to show that there are resources both in South Africa and beyond our borders that can help or provide useful examples. The Open University in the UK has made thousands of online courses available free of charge. They recently celebrated more than 20 million downloads of podcasts from their iTunes U site. The WikiEducator site has thousands of pages of course materials created by is more than 15,000 volunteers worldwide. This learning material is available free of charge to anyone. This website, created just 5 years ago at the Commonwealth of Learning is already one of the Internet’s top 100 most visited websites, with over 10 millions hits per month after just 5 years. 

Not to be outdone, there is free learning content in South Africa as well. This material focuses on micro-subsistence farming techniques that have worked in deep rural areas.

There will not be one right way to reach people in this initiative. We will need to use multiple channels as predicted in the planning documents.

In moving forward, we will need to take courage and do new things. I recently learned: "Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out." This is true of us now. We need to stick out our necks and make Career Advice work for South Africa.

Thank you for your time today. I hope this has been helpful and gives you some insight into what I have been doing in my first few weeks at SAQA.