There has been a radical shake-up of the Top 10 companies list for skills development in the 2007 Top Empowerment Companies survey. As with many other empowerment factors, the criteria for skills development have changed significantly.
Only two companies - insurance group Mutual & Federal and clothing retailer Foschini - that made it into last year's Top 10 managed to get onto this year's listing.
Mutual & Federal replaced Foschini at the top of list while the retailer drifted down to fourth place. Newcomers, mining groups Gold Fields and Exxaro Resources, came second and third respectively.
Empowerdex researcher Steven Hawes says the change in the list was largely due to a change in reporting criteria arising from the latest changes to government's Code's of Good Practice for broad-based black economic empowerment (BEE).
The latest version of the codes reduced the weighting for skills development from 20% to 15% and introduced criteria that most companies were slow to report on.
Hawes says one of the new criteria is the skills development of disabled black staff. This counts for three percentage points but so far only a handful of companies have reported what they were doing increase the skills of disabled staff members.
The codes also set aside six percentage points for learnerships, but firms have either under- reported what they are doing to develop the skills of young black people or they are just not doing enough to develop their skills.
The codes call for 5% of black staff members to undergo some kind of skills development training but few companies are reaching this target.
Companies have little reason to complain about a lack of government support. Finance minister Trevor Manuel announced in last year's budget that the learnership allowance would be extended to October 2011.
Companies also get tax relief for approved internship or learnership programmes.
Manuel also announced at the time that the labour department would set aside R4,4bn for sector education & training authorities (Setas), which are responsible for managing the learnerships.
Developing the skills of black staff members not only fosters transformation, it also boosts the overall skills profile of the country.
The failure of the country's education system to produce enough skilled people is seen as one of the major constraints of economic growth and a reason why unemployment remains high.
Skills development is a key part of government's Accelerated & Shared Growth Initiative, which aims to boost economic growth to a sustained 6%.
Government plans to increase the number of skilled workers through a state-private sector partnership, the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa).
