| Look Who Was Nominated! |
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SIE Foundational Learning Programme In early 2010 the Skills Development Unit of the eThekwini Municipality found a need to upgrade the skills of the Roads and Storm Water employees. A skills programme based on ABET, named ‘Sakha Isisekelo Esiqinile’ ‘SIE’ for short was designed and implemented. This foundational learning programme has been successfully facilitated since mid 2010. The success of the programme has been due to the fact that all learning material is based on workplace skills. The material was developed after extensive research into the day to day activities of the learners, in the workplace, and the goals they needed to achieve to be promoted to supervisory positions. Follow-up visits are done in the workplace to complete evaluations of the learners after they have had a month to implement their new skills. With the co-operation of the superintendents, learners are interviewed in a group and the relevance of the different aspects of the programme is discussed. Most learners have been loyal employees of the municipality for 15 years or longer and are given an opportunity through this programme to be promoted in their depots. With varied skills levels among the learners we have found that learners draw on each other’s strengths and the support and co-operation become part of the success of the learning that takes place in the classroom. The highlight of each intervention is definitely the graduation ceremony that comes on the last day of the revision week. When 53 days are concluded learners are always proud to actually interact with their managers who attend the ceremony and share in the successes. Our organisation was nominated, through this programme, along with three other small businesses (with less than 50 employees), for a BHP Billiton Achiever Award for Skills Development at a recent Skills Summit in Pretoria. This is an honour to our team who work tirelessly to address the skills shortages of our valued clients. |
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