South Africa is experiencing a widening supply chain skills gap that ultimately will impact the competitiveness of the country’s economy.This comes as companies continue to cut training and skills development budgets in the face of tough economic times.According to Kim Botti, a director at recruitment agency Lee Botti & Associates, many companies have simply not been in a position to train staff for the past few years.“Many businesses have gone through an exceptionally hard time over the past two and a half years for a variety of reasons, including Covid-19, the unrest and looting in several provinces last year, the f looding in KwaZulu-Natal, and more recently the Ukrainian war.”The situation has been exacerbated by the cost of shipping, the availability of space, as well as inf lation, resulting in many companies being in survival mode. “There are limited resources available for training, in time as well as spend,” says Botti. “And when recruiting at present, companies tend to seek candidates who have the necessary skills and can just jump in and get on with the role immed iately.”The Covid-19 pandemic, in particular, affected training and skills development significantly. Not only did it serve to heighten existing weaknesses in the system, but the funding more or less dried up.“Most organisations completely halted any education and training during the past two years,” says Juliette Fourie, managing director of training academy Metro Minds. “The skills dilemma exploded even more because only focused compliance training was done. At the same time resignations started to be seen across the industry. Besides resignations, retrenchments also happened, which has left a massive skills gap in most companies.”According to Botti, the pandemic also brought about a sudden change in the work environment. She says companies were forced to set up the necessary infrastructure to allow employees to work from home. This changed the landscape of the work world fundamentally. “Some people now prefer to work from home, but the reality is that in a service industry such as logistics, the necessity to have a team environment and knowledge sharing in a workspace is critical. The business has tried to build team morale by having a hybrid situation where there is the opportunity to have staff back in the office, while also having the opportunity to work from home.”Botti says a positive outcome of the pandemic, however, has been the worldwide focus on employee wellness. “During Covid people had time to consider their mental state and realise what is important,” she says. “Even when people have not worked for over a year, they are now re-entering the workplace with different expectations and stress thresholds than what was seen before.”Both Botti and Fourie agree that there is currently an urgent need for training across the industry, and that it is a resource that will become more and more critical.“Many businesses, however, are still trying to navigate the daily challenges they face in these trying times and may not yet be able to prioritise training and skills development at the moment,” says Botti.
