MEREL VAN DER LEI | The artisans SA says it cannot find are already clocked in

On a packaging line outside Pietermaritzburg, an operator slightly adjusts a machine because the packaging film is running tacky, thereby preventing a batch from jamming.

Two bays down, a setter finishes a die changeover in a third of the manual’s estimated time because she knows the most efficient sequence by memory.

Neither holds a formal certificate for what they just did. Yet both made the difference between a shift hitting its production targets and failing.

Walk any production line in the country and you find the same thing. Skill that is real, hard-won and applied by the hour, and almost entirely invisible to the way South Africa measures its industrial workforce development.

That blind spot has become expensive. In August last year the Bureau for Economic Research (BER) reviewed the Sector Education and Training Authority (Seta) system. It found that once you exclude the short, low-complexity courses that inflate headline numbers, certifying a single artisan through substantive routes like learnerships and artisanal programmes costs R388,052.

Skill that is real, hard-won and applied by the hour, and almost entirely invisible to the way South Africa measures its industrial workforce development. That blind spot has become expensive.

That is more than it costs to produce a university graduate, at R370,923. We pay a premium price for the paperwork, and still, based on the BER’s manufacturing survey, about half of manufacturers name the shortage of skilled labour as a serious constraint on their business.

The rest of the picture isn’t much better. Over the review period, Seta revenue rose 46% in real terms while the number of certifications fell 23%. Output per Seta employee dropped from 92 certifications a year to 35. Against the target implied by the National Skills Development Plan — roughly a tenth of the workforce trained each year — the system delivers between 4% and 6.6%. More money, fewer results, and a scoreboard that counts who enrolled rather than the competence already standing on the floor.

Mistaken instinct

Riaz Moola, who runs the training provider HyperionDev, put the diagnosis plainly in May: South Africa has “a growing outcomes problem”. Success in skills development, he argued, has for a long time been measured by how many people entered a programme rather than by what came of it. His world is digital talent, not toolmakers, but the flaw travels, and it is at its sharpest on a factory floor.

When the sector gathered at the Manufacturing Indaba in Sandton on July 14 and 15 under the banner Made in Africa: Scaling Growth, Shaping Trade, the artisan shortage came up again and again. The instinct was to call for more training, more enrolments, more throughput and more funding. That instinct mistook a measurement failure for a volume one. You cannot scale production that you cannot staff, and you cannot staff it from a system that grows more expensive and less productive every year.

Read: Only 42% qualify for IT jobs: how SA can fix surging skills gap

The certificate was never built to capture what keeps a line running. A qualification signed off in a classroom months ago says little about whether an operator can read the quirks of the specific machine in front of them today. That knowledge is built in the flow of the work, shift after shift, and it is the very thing manufacturers are short of. They have no shortage of people who have sat through training. What they lack is a way to see, prove and build on the competence their employees already demonstrate.

The stakes climb as the sector itself contracts. Manufacturing was the single biggest drag on GDP in the fourth quarter of 2025 and shrank again in the first quarter of 2026, a second consecutive decline even as the wider economy recorded its strongest (albeit from a low base) year since 2022. An industry under that sort of pressure cannot afford to pay a premium for certificates while the skill it actually needs goes unrecognised and underleveraged.

Frontline systems

None of this argues for scrapping qualifications, which still matter a lot for a worker’s mobility beyond any single employer. The correction is to stop treating the certificate as the finish line and to start recognising competence continuously, in the place where it is used. Frontline systems already make that practical.

When bite-sized training reaches an operator on the same phone that carries their roster and their payslip, learning becomes part of the working week rather than an annual or tedious event. When an employee logs a fault, records a fix or signs off a safety check on that device, the entry does two jobs at once. It stands as proof for an audit, but it also builds a live map of who can do what and where a gap is opening before it stops a line.

That gives leadership something a drawer of certificates never could: a current read and insights on capability across a workforce spread over many sites. Which competencies are strong. Which are thinning as experienced hands near retirement. Which needs attention this month rather than next year. The issue is that digitising workforces who work with their hands isn’t seen as part of the skills development dialogue.

That approach is also a matter of fairness in a country where 60.9% of young people aged 15-24 are unemployed. A young worker who can prove competence through their daily output, rather than relying solely on a certificate they may have struggled to access, gains a clearer route to recognition and promotion. Measuring skill where it happens rewards what people can already do — precisely what a labour market starved of artisans, yet crowded with excluded youth, needs.

South Africa does not need to spend more to build industrial skills. We need to stop mistaking attendance for ability and look at the factory floor. The artisans the sector says it cannot find are, in many cases, already clocked in. What has been missing is a system able to see them, recognise them, and leverage them as the foundation of the next generation of skilled artisans we need.

Time is running out, though. The opportunity exists only as long as organisations can keep these skilled individuals on the payroll before economic contractions or retirement intervene. It is a race we can still win — without spending billions more.

• Van der Lei is CEO of digital employee experience platform Wyzetalk.