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The Critical Skills List con

 The Department of Home Affairs has published a critical skills list for comment. As to be expected, analysts, so-called experts and media have rushed to comment upon the alleged scarcity of skills without examining the list, the methodology used to arrive at the list and skills, or more accurately jobs, listed therein. As DHA mention in their press release, the Department of Higher Education and Training previously published the list.

 The first problem is one of methodology: the compilers rely completely on vacancies posted on Career Junction. Career Junction is a website of vacancies, a digital classifieds. They regularly post the skills purportedly in demand in the country. CJ is an indicator only but not a single comprehensive database of all vacancies and skills in the country at any moment.

Second, can one seriously say that, at random, a cafe or restaurant manager, travel accommodation inspector, company secretary, event producer, false worker [sic], pharmacy sales assistant, etc are “acute” or “critical” skills?

 The fact is, like previously reports published by the DHET, the compilers took all vacancies published at a particular moment – on Career Junction of course – and assumed they were acute skills. While, for example, clerks of various types as listed are a skill, they're not what's understood by either acute or critical or skilled.

 Like DHET, DHA confuses the skills issue; it's a red herring: it's merely a vacancy list of all jobs posted on one human resources group's site, which the media and now the compilers - Home Affairs - inaccurately style as the definitive job site, at a particular moment rather than a reflection of bona fide acute aka scarce skills.

 South Africa doesn't have a skills shortage despite the confusion and misrepresentation about it from all parties. StatsSA is the one agency that has the competence and resources to compile a credible list of scarce skills although it's outside its core competence. Already they give us part of the answer in their Quarterly Labourforce Surveys that breaks down unemployment by gross skill level : education. The relatively high unemployment among graduates of all disciplines and across all ages indicates there's a surplus of highly skilled people, you know, not clerks and bricklayers (no offense to them, though).

 The only articles in the popular media that cogently, without false tropes and based on facts, analysed the skills situation was in 2015 by UK-based South African development economist Gavin Chait and mine in Politicsweb. (Chait investigated it following my query to him.) The rest, often including by so-called experts and uninformed media writers like this one, repeat the myth and spurious facts there’s a shortage of skills in the country.

 As usual government is too disinclined or inept to undertake a genuine assessment of acute skills or won't do the work (but relies on parties like CJ) and arrives at this list which one could've obtained from CJ's website. And I wish the media and analysts would critically assess the list and not promote the narrative these skills, many of which listed here are abundant, are acute or scarce.

 

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