INLSA
Tyrone Naidoo of the Subtech Group shows Thobekile Mkhize and Londeka Sikhakhane a divers mask and talks to them about a career at sea during, the SA Maritime Industry Careers Expo yesterday. Today is the expos job summit.
With the government battling high levels of unemployment, a potential reprieve is on the horizon – with the SA Maritime Job Summit at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban today.
The summit is meant to bring together key players in the maritime industry with members of the public and the private sector in an effort to unlock job opportunities.
Sindiswa Nhlumayo, who is the executive head of the SA Maritime Safety Authority Centre for Maritime Excellence, feels the summit is the first step in giving pupils and graduates access to almost guaranteed employment once they have qualified in their respective fields.
Nhlumayo said there was a dire shortage of seafarers in SA, and that there was huge potential for job creation.
“There are roughly 12 000 vessels operating within SA’s waters – ranging from cruise liners to cargo ships – and around 240 000 people are needed to work on these vessels [to keep them operational].”
“Currently there are only 2 500 South Africans qualified as seafarers,” she said, with foreign labour filling the balance of the positions.
Nhlumayo said that the massive local employment shortfall could be attributed to not enough being done at school and university levels to expose pupils to a career in |the maritime industry.
“As a coastal country, with the biggest port in Africa, we need to have schools that put forward the maritime industry,” she said.
“We need to create awareness at an early level.”
“We also only have two institutes [in the country] that train seafarers: Durban University of Technology and Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Each produces 120 graduates a year,” she said, emphasising that this was not nearly enough.
“We are engaging with the Department of Higher Education to beef up the facilities to produce graduates who will be instantly employed.”
“We have an ageing maritime workforce, and we cannot afford – as a country with 3 000km of coastline – not to exploit the employment opportunities.”
The summit will also see the launch of a “job portal” for the maritime industry, which aims to match graduates and employers by pooling all the necessary information on a central database.
“We are working with the Department of Labour and looking at launching it within a month. Once you are registered on the database, all potential employers have access to you,” she said, explaining that it would be multifaceted and divided into sub-sections to ensure searches could be targeted.
With the ministers of transport, labour and public enterprises all scheduled to attend the event today, the government seems to be throwing its weight behind the initiative to get people to think about a life not on solid ground.
Speaking at a dinner before the summit, Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande said it was important for the nation to provide quality jobs for its people, and that an expo like this contributed to that.
“With the figure of national unemployment at 24.9 percent, and the National Treasury figures putting unemployment among 18- to 30-year-olds at about 42 percent, the maritime sector is expected to be an important contributor in driving skills development and employment in the country.”
