South Africa’s matric class of 2019 has achieved impressive results, but may struggle to find work as the country faces constrained employment in 2020.
John Botha, chief operation officer at Global Business Solutions, said that this is highlighted by the country’s current growth level. Using a labour elasticity formula he noted that for each 1% growth in the GDP there is a corresponding 0.7% growth in employment.
“With a forecast 1.5% growth in 2020 along with accelerating technological disruption, the best-case scenario is that there may be around 100,000 new jobs created,” he said.
“This is a major challenge given that more than 500,000 grade 12s left the secondary schooling system in 2019.”
South Africa’s unemployment rate climbed to 29.1% in the third quarter of 2019 – its highest rate in over 16 years, while the real unemployment rate is closer to 40%.
Botha’s comments align with data from the Manpower Group’s Employment Outlook
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