Four skills development problems and how to solve them

Skills development is one of the priority elements of the B-BBEE scorecard, so getting it wrong can drop your level, and getting it right is harder than it sounds. B-BBEE exists to bring Black South Africans (African, Coloured and Indian people who meet the citizenship requirements in the B-BBEE Act) fully into the economy, and skills development is central to that. Below are the four problems we hear about most from companies. Each has a better answer than most people expect, and some of those answers are already written into the Codes.

1. The cost

Accredited training, learnerships and certifications are not cheap, and for small and medium businesses the bill can look out of reach.

What helps: look at the Category B, C and D programmes in the Learning Programme Matrix of the Codes, which cover apprenticeships, learnerships and internships. For these, you can include your employees' salaries for the time they spend in training as part of the recognised training cost. You are paying those salaries anyway, so the extra cash you need to find is smaller, and the programmes become far easier to afford. If you budget as though only the provider's invoice counts, you will overstate what the target costs you.

2. Keeping the business running

Training takes people away from their jobs. In specialised industries such as manufacturing, where every day of production counts, losing key staff to a course is a real problem. You want to upskill your people and earn the points, but you cannot close the office for a month.

What helps: understand the different types of training available and choose the ones that fit your operations. A blended approach, with short, targeted modules and brief on-site theory, lets employees learn without long absences. A SETA-registered learnership, for instance, can often be structured so that people are away only for scheduled theory sessions, with the practical learning done in their normal job.

You can also bring unemployed people into the business on a learnership, internship or apprenticeship. You train them and, at the same time, get a real return, because they are working in your business.

3. Getting employees on board

You might expect staff to welcome free training, but it is not always so. Some do not see the point, especially when no promotion or raise is attached. Others, once trained, leave for a competitor.

What helps: tie completion of training to clear incentives, such as a guaranteed promotion (which can double as part of your long-term employment equity strategy), a salary increase or a performance bonus. You can also set conditions in the training agreement, for example that the employee stays for an agreed period after training or repays the cost if they leave early.

Take care with bursaries, though, because here the Codes draw a firm line. They do not recognise bursary spend you can recover, unless the only conditions are that the student completes the studies on time or works for you afterwards for no longer than the study period. A repayment clause that protects you may cost you the points. Explain the benefits and the conditions openly, so that people commit knowing what is expected on both sides.

4. Keeping the evidence

Every training initiative has to be backed by receipts, attendance records and SETA accreditation documents, and a missing document can cost you the points.

In our experience the audit requirement is not the real difficulty. The trouble comes from gathering evidence at the last minute: hunting for misplaced receipts, or reconstructing attendance records months after a session. Build a system that captures evidence as the training happens, and year-end becomes a routine check rather than a panic.

What is at stake

These pressures are real, and they show how hard it is to balance transformation with running a business. But the stakes are high. Under the Codes of Good Practice (the 2013 Codes as amended in 2019, Government Gazette 42496), skills development is a priority element: if you score less than 40% of its 20 points, your B-BBEE level drops by one level. That is a whole level lost for one element, which can cost you contracts in sectors where your level matters to customers.

Some critics say B-BBEE can feel like a box-ticking exercise, or that it benefits only a small elite. That frustration is understandable. Our answer is that each well-run programme gives someone a qualification, a job or a step up, and the four fixes above are what make a programme well run. Be strategic, start the record-keeping early, and talk to us when you are stuck.

If one of these problems sounds familiar, send us a note at sales@bsvision.co.za and we will work through it with you.