In South Africa, skills development is the cornerstone of the government’s developmental strategy on which economic growth rests; rising unemployment and the skills shortage has added urgency to the issue. Before 1994, vocational education and training (VET) was the foundation of apartheid industrial and social programmes to alleviate poverty, particularly amongst poor white Afrikaners. Even today, skills development remains one of the government policies used to promote economic growth and address a range of developmental problems. Much public discourse on the South African economy has been on the unemployment crisis, skills shortage, and poor quality of education. However, few studies highlight the voices and real-world experiences of people who have participated in VET. Drawing on secondary literature and in-depth interviews, my study of the steel-producing company ISCOR/AMSA shows that during apartheid, the government social assistance and industrial policy supported the skills development programme and provided the poor whites who came to live in Vanderbijlpark with various employment opportunities. It also investigates why post-1994 VET is not as effective, showing that post-1994 policies have been unable to solve unemployment because (a) they are not embedded in social and industrial frameworks, and this has led to high unemploy-ment, and (b) the stringent technical entry requirements and employment flexibility exclude many young, unemployed black South Africans and only benefit a few. © 2023, Nordic Journal of African Studies, University of Copenhagen Centre of African Studies. All rights reserved.
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