We, as Adient PPC & CRH-Africa (“the organisation”) pride ourselves on actively contributing to the development of the next generation of leaders within our industry. Our point of departure in this undertaking is to balance the skills development needs of our current employees with the need to inject inexperienced youth into our organization for exposure and potential succession opportunities for the future. Our organisation does not restrict youth development initiatives to a single month, but rather looks at holistic programs of at least one year in duration to provide the practical foundation for inexperienced and/or unemployed youth looking for exposure in the workplace.
An appropriate example of such initiatives would be our participation in the YES program, which ran from the 1st of July 2020 to the 30th of June 2021, which saw our organization welcome 30 unemployed youths into the workplace. At the end of the program, we had the pleasure of not only meeting the retention requirement of 2 youths but retaining 14 youths as employees within our organization. The success of the YES program encouraged us to expand into a Graduate- in-training program for the remainder of 2021 and into the early stages of 2022. This, too, introduced us to graduates who grabbed the opportunity of workplace exposure and really made themselves an indivisible part of our organization resulting in a 95% retention rate.
Further to in-house driven initiatives, we have also partnered with the AIDC for projects such as the High Gear Initiative, which provides short term placement to TVET students to gain practical exposure to a workplace relative to their field of studies. We successfully hosted 10 students during February 2022 and we are looking to replicate this initiative in July/August this year.
As we move forward off the back of the abovementioned successes, we are in the process of merging our graduate-in-training initiative with the YES program and will be looking to launch same in our organization within the next 2 months. Our organisation affirms its commitment to youth development as we have, personally, seen the rewards within our organization as well as the growth of the respective participants/youths.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” – Nelson Mandela
Kind regards
Gareth Fismer General Manager: South African Operations