South Africa’s job minefield
While South Africa celebrated a rise in the pass rate of matric pupils to 73.9% in 2012, a tertiary graduate expert has questioned the ability for graduates to find meaningful employment in 2013.
On Thursday (10 January) Adcorp’s employment index revealed that employment in South Africa increased by an annualised rate of 0.8% in December‚ showing that the number of jobs grew by 12‚556.
Adcorp said that, in the last four months of 2012, the economy added 125‚029 jobs – 12‚556 in December alone – reversing the decline of the first eight months of last year.
However, the professional services firm noted that the broad statistics‚ while positive‚ obscured the negative permanent jobs landscape‚ where employment declined by 5‚542 in December‚ whereas temporary jobs increased by 9‚074 during the month.
Skills and relevance
National Coordinator for the South African Graduate Recruiters Association (Sagra), Cathy Sims highlighted the quandary facing the country; namely, too many graduates and not enough jobs.
The expert believes that SA needs to get to grips with a situation of oversupply versus demand in a number of jobs sectors. Sim called on students to skill themselves up in multiple disciplines as best they can in order to get a foot in the door to a potentially meaningful career.
Labour economist at Adcorp, Loane Sharp said last year that as many 600,000 university graduates were sitting at home, unemployed, mostly due to the irrelevance of their degrees in proportion to the demands in the local job market.
Professionals including accountants, lawyers, medical doctors and engineers had the lowest unemployment rates, at 0.4%.
Survey
Research conducted by Sagra in 2012 – and based on responses from 80 of the largest graduate employers in the country including tech firms EOH, and IMB, and Multichoice – found that graduate vacancies are set to increase in 2013 by 5%, compared to the numbers recruited in 2012.
The median graduate starting salary for 2012 was R134,000, and with the median number of vacancies in 2012 at 20, four-fifths of organisations were set to maintain or increase their vacancy levels for 2013.
Online appeal
Four-fifths of employers reported having some form of presence on social media sites, while more than a third of candidates used social networking sites as part of their job hunting.
Employers’ own websites and university careers fairs were the most heavily used sources of information for candidates when searching for a job. However, more than a third used Facebook to help with their job hunting.
“The challenge remains finding the right candidates to fill the roles and many employers are fighting for the same high calibre individuals,” said Sims.
“Graduates are an integral part of so many employers’ recruitment strategies and the war for talent is as fierce as ever. As a result employers are finding new and engaging ways to interact with prospective job hunters which includes everything from promotions on campus to having a recruitment presence on social media sites.”
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