The Synergy between Educational Qualification Levels and Youth Employability: The Case of Kanyamazane, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Phindile Ntini, Christiana Kappo-Abidemi

Abstract


Unemployment is a global issue that negatively affects people, especially the youth. Youth unemployment impacts the current and future economies of every nation. A lack of required prerequisites for work might impede an individual’s chance of being employable. There are many contributing factors to the gradually increasing unemployment rate, including the flawed education system inherited from the apartheid system in South Africa, which limits the skills and knowledge required to function at work. The study focuses on the impact of educational qualifications on youth employability in Kanyamazane (a rural area in the Mbombela Municipality of Mpumalanga, South Africa). A non-probability convenience sampling technique was used to select the study participants among the Kanyamazane youth with N=106. The research instrument was self-developed with five Likert scales ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). The descriptive statistics used frequency, mean, standard deviation and percentage to describe the demographic information of participants and responses to research items. Spearman’s Correlation was used to test the relationship between selected demographic and research item variables, and the result showed significant relationships (p>0.05) between most of the variables. Similarly, one-way analysis was done using One-way Analysis of variance to determine the impact of various educational qualification levels on the employability status of the participants. The result showed a statistically significant difference (p>0.05) in the different levels of educational qualifications and employability status of the participants. Hence, it showed that educational level has a significant impact on the youths’ employability, and the study recommended that youths should be given equal access to quality education.

https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.24.3.36


Keywords


education; employability; qualification levels; unemployment; youths

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References


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