Fragmented approach to training impacts skills development

In the SA airfreight and aviation industries, the available training is not able to produce enough skilled staff to overcome the severe skills shortage, according to Alwyn Rautenbach, MD of Airlink International Cargo and chairman of the Air Cargo Operators’ Committee (Acoc). “It is almost impossible to find suitably skilled staff, and this lack of manpower is not being reduced by the training industry as it exists in SA,” he said. He is happy to admit that there are certain establishments that produce top-notch courses – but there are just too few to be able to offer the wide spectrum of everything that the freight industry needs in training. A major problem that cannot be overcome, according to Rautenbach, is that the SA aviation industry – indeed the freight industry as a whole – is just not a big enough marketplace to support the necessary quantity or quality of training facilities. And the training industry itself suffers from what Rautenbach describes as “the bits and pieces” failing. “The training market doesn’t really give the broad spectrum of knowledge that is needed,” he told FTW. “It’s composed of lots of relatively small organisations which are utterly incapable of taking people far enough along in skills, and at such a level that they can take the learners from the beginning to the end of their career path.” There are just too many courses-upon-courses, Rautenbach suggested, but with no final goal in sight. “You end up sending lots of people to lots of training institutions to do lots of specialised courses,” he said. “But this is not what career planning is all about.” The utopia that SA is highly unlikely ever to see, he added, is a freight academy or university – taking pupils from absolute novice standard to top diploma level. But the dream and reality are poles apart, said Rautenbach.