Ricoh has successfully coached another 20 learners through its Ricoh Learnership Programme and they are recognised under the Media, Information and Communication Technologies Sector Education Training Authority (MICT Seta) guidelines.
Graduates are National Qualifications Framework (NQF) level 5-qualified systems support personnel.
“Our learnerships have been designed to help redress wide scale unemployment in SA,” says Brent Nestler, learning and development manager at Ricoh SA. “One of the biggest challenges school leavers and job seekers have is that companies want experience, skill and knowledge but job seekers cannot gain experience without first having a job. It’s a terrible catch-22 situation.”
“The programme contributes to our socio-economic development initiatives, it is a fundamental component of our equity strategy, it creates opportunities for job seekers and some of them have already been placed full time with our business,” he says, “and others becoming more appealing to other employers.”
Desani Moodley, learning and development officer at Ricoh SA, says that Ricoh SA works with the SETA and a registered training provider, CTU Training Solutions, to deliver a formal qualification. Part of the academic component includes soft skills development and product training for six months with a further six months spent gaining workplace experience on actual tasks, projects and daily activities in various departments at Ricoh SA.
“They gain a great deal of mentoring and guidance to learn many soft skills crucial to developing practical work experience that aren’t typically acquired through formal, academic exposure,” says Moodley.
The group of 20 is divided into two groups: those who are already employed after completing the previous year’s learnership with Ricoh and those who are new students. Learners from 2012 were trained to NQF level 4 so they were offered the opportunity to participate in an internship programme for 2013 to boost their qualification to NQF level 5.
“The graduates are IT systems engineers but we don’t limit them to those positions,” says Nestler. “One of our graduates is really shining in an administration position and he’s been happy to stay there. Typically, though, graduates will go into roles such as the workshop, field services, IT support and help desk.”
He adds that Ricoh SA is committed to sustaining this programme and already has a new group of 15 learners underway. He says the medium term goal is for Ricoh SA itself to become a registered training provider.
“The quality of the graduates has opened our eyes,” says Moodley. “They have demonstrated a very strong work ethic that has resulted in numerous work and job opportunities for them beyond what we initially planned. Most of them are matriculants but some have other tertiary qualifications.
“A nice irony we’ve noticed is that some of the learners have more qualifications behind their names when they graduate than people already employed by the business – although they obviously lack the years and sometimes decades of experience of the others.”
