It is expected that the government’s national employability strategy will address all the issues concerning the under-utilization of skills, knowledge, and talent in the country. However, it also aims to promote a sense of belonging and belongingness in the country – and this is what a national employment strategy is basically about. According to this strategy, if the employed are given a sense of being employed, then they will be more inclined to return to work and contribute to the economic well-being of the nation.
There is much confusion as regards the design of the national employability strategy. One of the main questions revolves around training and development. Will the national employment strategy to encourage training and development, or will it focus on the industrial bases? There are many who believe that industrial bases are more important than other bases such as training and development. These people believe that proper industrial bases are key to the national success as far as national employment is concerned.
This is a controversial argument, as it appears from the national employment plan itself, which suggests that the focus of the plan should be on development. The report states that the goal of the national employment strategy is to ensure that the best available resources are made available to those who are looking for jobs. The report goes on to state that this is done by ensuring access to affordable training and that training must be focused on skills rather than on certifications. The problems with these arguments are many. One problem is that, first of all, it is not clear whether affordable training equates to affordable training, and secondly, it is not clear whether training and development are an appropriate concept in the first place.
Another major problem associated with the national employability plan concerns the implementation of the plan. Many argue that it was implemented too fast, and that it failed to address various issues such as the impact of new technology on the job market and that there is still a dearth of skills available for entry-level positions. In addition, critics argue that the employer scheme has not been designed in a way that addresses the changing needs of companies and their workers. In effect, this means that employers are not necessarily adopting the national employment strategy as such, but adopting it in a more generic fashion, as if it were a universal solution to all employment problems. This can be viewed as a fundamental flaw, as there cannot be a universal plan unless the intention is to have one.
The other major flaw is that the employers are themselves adopting a generic approach in trying to implement the national employability initiative. This is a problem in two ways. First, employers will adopt the approach because it is easy, and they know that it will yield positive results. Second, the general approach adopted may not solve the problem of poor performance at work. This is because the problem is something that may be outside the purview of the employers, and if it is outside their purview, they cannot claim that they are implementing an initiative that will solve this problem.
All this means that the implementation of the national employability strategy is flawed from its inception, and the flaws are becoming more conspicuous as the years go by. It is no longer enough to say that the national employment plan has failed. It has to be said that it is doing so at an alarming rate, with measures being introduced that will only make things worse. In other words, the time for idle talk about the virtues of the national employability plan is now over. Now is the time to act, and employers must do so in order to ensure that they get the best services from their employees.