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As a part of the DA’s Jobs Campaign, I am today pleased to announce the launch of the DA Youth’s ‘Own Your Future’ workshop series.

The series will consist of over 70 skills workshops focusing on C.V. and job interview techniques that the DA Youth will roll out across South Africa to help young unemployed people become more competitive in the job market.

Through the DA’s Jobs Campaign, the party has identified a number of barriers to growth and job creation in South Africa to which we have proposed a range of solutions including the youth wage subsidy, increased infrastructure development and more flexible labour laws, as well as a range of education and entrepreneurship linked interventions. These interventions focus both on the demand-side of the labour market i.e. incentives to stimulate the demand for employees, as well as the supply side i.e. ensuring people have the necessary skills to compete in the labour market.

When it comes to the skills required for job seekers to be competitive, many school leavers are left woefully unequipped by the education system with the knowledge necessary to successfully seek and secure employment. With over 3.2 million unemployed people under 35 in South Africa all competing for jobs, strong job seeking skills are vital if a young person is ever to have the prospect of attaining employment.

The DA Youth has therefore developed the ‘Own your Future’ workshops in an attempt to equip as many young people as our resources allow with these basic job seeking skills. The workshops will be rolled out in every province in South Africa by a trained group of facilitators and will cover basic skills such as how to find job opportunities, make oneself a competitive candidate, how to compile an appropriate C.V. and how to present oneself for a successful job interview.

We hope that these workshops, combined with numerous other interventions, will help to transform South Africa from a nation of people forced to be reliant on hand-outs into a proud nation of productive workers and business people.