The Department of Higher Education will release its new critical skills list in April this year.
Businesses, Human Resources (HR) professionals, recruiters and business owners have the opportunity to communicate to the department those skills they believe are in short supply.
The scarce skills cited in last year’s audit are wide-ranging and include highly skilled senior finance executives such as Chief Financial Officers (CFO), teachers, as well as people with legal, Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) and agricultural skills.
The Department of Basic Education spokesperson, Elijah Mhlanga, says they will also change the curriculum to facilitate the teaching of subjects that are needed for the critical skills list.
“We are working towards meeting the needs of the economy and we are introducing subjects that are going to prepare learners for careers that don’t exist yet. For the first time in 2018, we had technical maths and technical science in matric at examination level. We, for the first time in our schools are going to have coding not in all the schools but we are starting small to see how learners are going to respond to it,” says Mhlanga.
