Stakeholders’ perspectives on TVET colleges-industry partnerships for employability of graduates : an exploratory study of TVET colleges in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore stakeholders’ perspectives on TVET college and industry partnerships for the employability of TVET college graduates. The study investigates the nature of current partnerships, the roles partners play, and the challenges currently being faced. The study also proposes a new framework for improving partnerships between TVET colleges and the industry. The study was conducted in Mpumalanga, a province of South Africa. The ever-increasing number of unemployed youths as noted by StatsSA and many other organisations motivated me to want to find out if better TVET college and industry partnerships could alleviate the problem of unemployability. It was my assumption in this study that better partnerships between these two stakeholders could yield positive results as far as the employability of TVET college graduates was concerned. I used a qualitative research design to gather in-depth insights from stakeholders as to how current partnerships could be improved. Data were collected using in-depth interviews, focus groups and document analysis. Participants included TVET college students and graduates, an official from DHET, two Deputy Principals: Academic and two Student Support Services officials responsible for student placement into the workplace. I used interpretivism as a research paradigm. This allowed me to interpret a lot of subjective data collected from the participants. This involved processing large amounts of data and ascribing meaning to them. Data collected revealed that there was a concerted effort from DHET and TVET colleges to engage partners to improve the employability of TVET college graduates. However, the data also revealed several challenges concerning partnerships. The challenges included a lack of planning, leadership, organisation and supervision or control of the whole process. The other challenge was the complete lack of industry placement for NCV students and a few partnerships forged for NATED students. In addition to properly managing student placement in industry, I also recommended that instead of the five-to-ten-day workplace-based experience (WBE) for NCV, colleges must consider a completely new programme where students are placed for a whole year in industry, and they are assessed and given marks. I also recommended that these students do a practical project during this placement period so that they gain an even more profound understanding of their vocational programmes. I also recommended that this programme be a compulsory part of the student’s studies. I also recommended a regular review of syllabi to ensure currency and relevance. The study is useful in that it exposes challenges currently being experienced in TVET colleges and industry partnerships and proposes practical ways of improving these. I believe that better-managed partnerships would result in graduates who are employable and future employers who are confident of the capabilities of these graduates. Involving industry in the training of graduates is of paramount importance. The research was conducted in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. It would be interesting to carry out similar research in other provinces to get a sense of what is obtained in the rest of South Africa. The data collected in other provinces would give a clearer picture of what is happening and the recommendations thereof would be relevant for the whole of South Africa.