Scare and Critical Skills

The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has mandated the SETAs to gather data on Scarce and Critical Skills. The information gathered is used to publish the National Scarce Skills List for South Africa; this list gives a comprehensive account of the skills that are needed for economic growth and development. The Department of Home Affairs makes use of the National Scarce Skills list to develop the current Work Permit Quota List that they publish annually.

It was adopted by the Accelerated Shared Growth in South Africa's Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition as the ‘AgriSA Master Skills List’ and can be used throughout schools and training institutions for career guidance.

Scarce Skills refer to an absolute or relative demand: current or in future, for skilled, qualified and experienced people to fill roles/professions, occupations or specialisations in the labour market. Scarce skills are usually measured in terms of occupation or qualification. Both ‘occupation’ and ‘qualification’ have the merit of being relatively straightforward to measure and readily understood.

The Ministry has also included a differentiation between absolute and relative scarcity of skills in the definition:

Absolute scarcity refers to suitably skilled people who are not available in the labour market. Specific contexts in which absolute scarcities may arise include:

• A new or emerging occupation, i.e. there are few if any people in the country with the requisite skills.
• Firms, sectors and even the national economy are unable to implement planned growth strategies because productivity, service delivery and quality problems are directly attributable to a lack of skilled people.
• Replacement demand would reflect an absolute scarcity where there are no people enrolled or engaged in the process of acquiring the skills that need to be replaced.

Relative scarcity refers, for example, to the context where suitably skilled people are in fact available in the labour market, but they do not exhibit other employment criteria, for example:

• High-level work experience, for example project management of large construction sites such as dams or power plants.
• Geographical location, for example people are unwilling to work outside urban areas.
• Equity considerations, for example, there are few if any candidates with the requisite skills from specific groups available to meet the skills requirements of firms and enterprises. (DoL, 2007)