Your headline (IMF flags SA’s skills shortage, January 17) is misleading, if not inaccurate. It repeats the false narrative that there’s a dire shortage of skills that’s "harming the economy". A skills mismatch is not a skills shortage. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) Global Agenda Council on Employment (Matching skills and labour market needs, January 2014) describes it like this: "Skills mismatches occur when workers have either fewer or more skills than jobs require. Some mismatch is inevitable as the labour market involves complex decisions by employers and workers and depends on many external factors. But high and persistent skills mismatch is costly for employers, workers and society at large." It’s not uncommon either. The WEF states that it’s "become more prominent in the global economic crisis. However, it is primarily a structural issue." In SA, the establishment — media, government and business — pushes the "skills shortage" narrative for tendentious agendas or out of ...
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