Training for what? Rethinking youth skills, digital work and decent employment

By Craig Kensley, Executive Director of GrowZA Social Investment Agency

A case study authored by Craig Kensley of GrowZA Social Investment Agency has been published in the International Labour Organization-linked Good Practices in BRICS Countries in the World of Work compilation.

The case study, “Decent and Dignified Digital Work from the Margins of Digital Society: A South-South and triangular research partnership on youth skills and decent work,” examines a question that sits underneath much of the current enthusiasm around skills development and the digital economy: what kind of work are we actually preparing young people for?

For years, the development sector has treated skills as an almost uncomplicated good. More training, more certification and more placements are generally taken as evidence that a programme is working.

In a country carrying South Africa’s levels of youth unemployment, there is good reason to take those outcomes seriously. But training is not the same as mobility, and employment is not automatically evidence that a person’s economic position has improved.

That distinction sits at the centre of the GrowZA case study included in the BRICS good-practice collection. The work examines how digital training can improve employability while still directing young people towards insecure, poorly protected or downward-skilled work.

It asks when skilling supports fair pay, secure conditions, meaningful work and upward mobility, and when it simply shifts more labour-market risk onto young workers.

Moving beyond placement

Skills programmes need measurable outcomes, and placement remains an important one. The problem comes when placement becomes the point at which the enquiry stops.

Two young people may both appear as successful placements on a programme dashboard while experiencing very different outcomes. One may enter a role that builds capability, income, professional networks and future bargaining power. The other may enter precarious work with limited security, weak progression and skills that do not travel easily between employers. Both can be counted as employment, but they are not the same development result.

A stronger approach to social investment therefore needs to follow the pathway further. We should be asking whether a person remains employed, whether their skills increase in value over time, whether they can move between roles and sectors, whether their income improves and whether the work creates a credible route to progression.

These are harder questions than counting training completions or placements, but they take us closer to the economic outcome that skills programmes are meant to produce.

Why digital work sharpens the problem

The digital economy is regularly presented as one of the most promising opportunity spaces for young people, and with good reason. Digital capability can open access to sectors, markets and forms of work that were previously difficult to reach.

But “digital work” describes an extremely wide spectrum of employment. It can mean sophisticated technical roles with strong progression prospects, or fragmented and heavily monitored work in which workers carry considerable economic insecurity. Both may be described as participation in the digital economy, but their implications for the worker are very different.

Artificial intelligence makes this distinction more urgent. The question is no longer simply whether a person is being trained for a job that exists today. We increasingly need to understand whether the capabilities being developed are portable enough to remain useful as occupations, tasks and industries change.

That shifts the design challenge for skills programmes. The objective should not only be to prepare people to perform particular tasks, but to build capability that can travel across changing labour markets.

Bringing research closer to implementation

The case study grew from a collaboration involving Cape Peninsula University of Technology and Malmö University, with research and institutional relationships extending into India. GrowZA participates as a sectoral and community partner, connecting the research to young people, employers and existing skills-development environments.

Research team in Dehli, India, 2024

This architecture is important because research about development systems can easily become separated from the decisions through which those systems actually operate. Researchers generate evidence, funders allocate capital, programme designers build interventions, training providers deliver them and employers recruit. Communities then experience the combined consequences of decisions taken across all of those layers.

The BRICS case study identifies the formal inclusion of a social investment agency in the research process as part of the innovation. GrowZA contributes experience of how funding choices, partnerships and implementation decisions shape youth-skills programmes, allowing research questions and assumptions to be tested against programme reality before conclusions are fixed. Academic partners provide research rigour, while implementation and community partners broaden both the evidence base and the routes through which findings can influence practice.

For GrowZA, this is increasingly important territory. Useful development knowledge should not be produced at a distance from the institutions and decisions it is intended to influence. Research becomes more valuable when it is connected to the realities of funding, implementation, labour markets and lived experience.

South-South cooperation as knowledge production

The publication also sits within a broader conversation about South-South and triangular cooperation.

Too often, knowledge exchange is treated as a softer form of replication. One institution develops a model, another visits it, a workshop follows and the expectation is that the idea can then be transferred elsewhere.

The more valuable opportunity is comparison.

When young people in different labour markets encounter recurring problems around progression, skills portability or job quality, comparison helps distinguish what is specific to a local context from what may reflect broader structural changes in the world of work.

This is particularly important for African and other Global South institutions. The purpose of South-South cooperation should not simply be to improve access to knowledge generated elsewhere. It should also strengthen the capacity of Southern institutions to produce knowledge from their own contexts and contribute that knowledge to global debate.

The case study explicitly positions the participating Southern contexts as knowledge-generating environments rather than passive recipients of a predetermined Northern model.

That distinction closely reflects how GrowZA approaches its own work. South Africa does not only need better access to global models. It needs stronger institutions capable of learning from their own systems, testing assumptions against local realities and producing insight that is useful well beyond the country itself.

What are we actually funding?

The publication ultimately brings the discussion back to a practical social-investment question.

When a company, foundation or public institution funds a youth skills programme, what outcome is it trying to buy?

Training hours, qualifications and placements are legitimate indicators, but they are intermediate outcomes. The deeper objective is some form of increased economic agency: greater capability, better access to work, stronger earning potential and improved ability to navigate future labour-market change.

A more useful way of thinking about the investment chain is therefore to connect capital to programme design, programme design to capability, capability to work, and work to progression and economic agency.

The further we follow that chain, the more difficult evaluation becomes. It also becomes considerably more meaningful.

The inclusion of this work in Good Practices in BRICS Countries in the World of Work is valuable recognition for GrowZA, but the more important contribution is the question the case study puts back into the system: if we are investing heavily in preparing young people for work, we should be much more precise about the kind of work, mobility and economic future those investments are actually creating.

That is the standard against which skills development should increasingly be judged.

This is how we #GrowZA

About the author

Craig Kensley is Executive Director of GrowZA Social Investment Agency, a South African strategy and social-investment practice working across development strategy, investment architecture, governance, applied research and programme design.

Kensley is the author of the GrowZA case study “Decent and Dignified Digital Work from the Margins of Digital Society”, included as a good practice in Good Practices in BRICS Countries in the World of Work. The work explores youth skills, decent digital employment, skills portability and the relationship between research, social investment and labour-market outcomes.