The National Skills Development Strategy: a new institutional regime for skills formation in post-apartheid South Africa

SOURCE: Shifting understandings of skills in South Africa: overcoming the historical imprint of a low skills regime
OUTPUT TYPE: Chapter in Monograph
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2004
TITLE AUTHOR(S): A.Kraak
SOURCE EDITOR(S): S.McGrath, A.Badroodien, A.Kraak, L.Unwin
KEYWORDS: HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT, POST APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
DEPARTMENT: Equitable Education and Economies (IED)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 2541
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/8074
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/8074

If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.

Abstract

this chapter provides a detailed overview of the South African Government's new National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS), which was formally launched in February 2001. The new strategy replaces the narrow, short-termist and voluntarist model of enterprise training which predominated during the apartheid period with a new framework based on: greater co-ordination and planning; greater stakeholder consensus; and improved funding arrangements which cede to the state and the new Sectoral Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) real leverage over the direction of training initiatives. The chapter is primarily a detailed descriptive exposition if the new training policy. This is intentionally so given the almost total absence of any other academic writing on the NSDS. However the analysis is not purely descriptive, because it interprets many of the features of the NSDS as having much in common with some of the key characteristics of high skills systems elsewhere in the world.