CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST
How do we plan to meet South Africa’s future skills needs?
A space to engage theory, policy and practice
May 2016
The Department of Higher Education and Training and the Labour Market Intelligence Partnership (LMIP) invite you to participate in a conference to build a research-policy-practice nexus around skills planning.
In a global and local economy it is important to understand what types of key occupations, and accompanying skills, are required to support social development, economic growth, trade and investment. It is equally significant to understand what qualifications and skills training are required to ensure that the needs of society and the economy are met. Since 1994 there have been efforts to plan for skills development, but the skills planning mechanism has failed to operate as effectively as anticipated. This can be partly attributed to over-ambitious objectives and to a lack of co-ordination among key players. Hence, the 2010 delivery agreement signed between the President and Minister of Higher Education and Training required the DHET to lead a process to ‘establish a credible institutional mechanism for skills planning.’ This represents a coherent attempt to develop a more realistic approach to skills planning that encompasses stronger coordination across government Ministries, as well as establishes links between decision making processes and outputs from a Labour Market Intelligence System.
The DHET tasked the Human Sciences Research Council to lead the LMIP research consortium in support of the goal of developing a national mechanism for skills planning. The LMIP proposes an integrated economic approach to education and skills planning, which encompasses improved levels of education and training for the population, improved workplace skills training, and emphasises a demand-side driven approach to planning in which strategies for skills development are aligned with policies for inclusive economic growth and social development. The LMIP researchers have proposed an architecture, frameworks and processes, and new datasets for creating an evidence base for skills planning over the medium to long term.
New approaches to and methods for skills planning continue to be undertaken at a number of levels by other actors: within national government departments to align with specific strategic priorities, within sectoral systems led by SETAs or industry associations, within provincial economic planning networks, within professional associations and occupational bodies, or within the emerging Occupational Teams set up in relation to public sector infrastructure projects.
We thus propose this conference as a new kind of space for researchers, policy makers, planners, educators and trainers to engage, by sharing frameworks, approaches and practices of skills planning. The aim is to aid the implementation of skills planning to support policy at different levels and in different spaces.
We invite you to contribute in relation to five focus areas:
- Approaches to skills planning
- Identifying occupations in high demand
- Macro, meso- and micro-level skills planning
- Transitions from education into the labour market
- Creating reliable and credible datasets
We aim to have a wide range of presentation formats that will allow for engagement between participants from the research, policy and practice spheres. Traditional and creative formats are envisaged, including:
- Panel presentations
- Question and Answer panels
- Policy discussion workshops
- Implementation design workshops
- Forecasting and modelling demonstration sessions
Please send expressions of interest to participate in the form of an abstract that describes how you propose to address one of the five focus areas, in terms of both the focus content and the format.
Send your expression of interest by 25 September 2015 to:
All enquiries to Rushil Ranchod or Glenda Kruss
