Much has been said of Africa’s skills shortages, with many businesses investing heavily in skills and training programmes to fill the gaps they have in their own businesses. While these have seen some measure of success, they are resource intensive to run and can cause administrative headaches for the HR departments tasked with managing them.
That’s why local talent management solution provider TalentUP has developed a home-grown solution that not only simplifies the administrative portion of skills development programmes, but allows participants to actively plot and track their development performance. TalentUP.app, an easy-to-use application available for PCs, tablets and smartphones, provides a one-stop talent and youth development portal.
“For legislative and governance reasons, the reporting element of skills development programmes is extremely onerous. Many HR departments find themselves spending hours and hours every month collecting, drawing and printing reports for learners participating in their ongoing training schedules – some of which can run concurrently. This not only takes time away from the other tasks they need to do, it’s an unnecessarily manual process in today’s technological age,” says Serena Padayachee, Chief Talent Officer at TalentUP.
Serena Padayachee – Chief Talent Officer – TalentUP.
Joining forces with local technology distributor AIGS to develop the application, TalentUP has not only automated the reporting process, but has provided a solution that allows for responsive management and monitoring of training and skills programmes. In addition, it is tailored to the DTI’s requirements, providing easy-to-use templates.
“We wanted to make the lives of HR people easier, but we also wanted to provide a platform that will take youth development in South Africa to the next level,” Padayachee explains. “While extremely valuable, learnerships and training programmes are only half of the skills development story. Once participants have gone through a programme, some are placed in positions within the company and others go into the job market. At the moment, there’s no easy way for companies looking to recruit skilled youth to find those who have been through a training programme.”
TalentUP.app will therefore provide a catalogue of learnerships and employment records, making it easy for companies to find suitable candidates to fill positions. In the future, it will also allow job seekers to post their CVs, essentially creating a specialised job board.
“Upskilling and uplifting the youth of this country is my passion, and the reason TalentUP came into existence. Having consulted on hundreds of training programmes and learnerships, and having seen the difficulty HR departments have in finding young candidates to add to their workforces, I believe the app will provide a much-needed matchmaking service that the current recruitment avenues don’t provide,” Padayachee says.
“This is going to be an ongoing development process, with more features added to TalentUP.app as needs arise. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a central place that will meet all the requirements of corporate South Africa as well as young job seekers.”
Rick Parry, CEO of AIGS, explains that this application is the first to be developed and hosted locally on the Rollbase Rapid Application Development platform, making it extremely quick and easy to add features and tailor the app to specific needs. “We are looking forward to seeing the evolution and growth of TalentUP.app, and are proud to be associated with an initiative of this nature. Skills development – particularly among the youth – is essential to South Africa’s future success, and this application will provide a central point from which to grow projects in this space.
Behind the scenes: TalentUP
TalentUP is a women majority black-owned Small Medium Micro Enterprise (SMME) specialising in the field of skills development and youth engagement in the workplace. The company enables workplaces to focus on growing and developing talent, especially those in the youth market and provides a holistic skills development and transformation service.
The company has developed an application, TalentUP.app, to help companies acquire, empower and engage with young talent. The application allows employers and learners, interns and apprentices to track their developmental performance – and then trace and build on their on-going employment status once the skills intervention has been completed.
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