Healthy employment creation is key to boosting growth, reducing poverty, and increasing social cohesion. At the national level, job creation requires a stable macroeconomic framework coupled with structural policies that encourage innovation, skills, and business development. But how can national and local policies better align and tailor to specific local opportunities and challenges?

There are barriers to getting the local conditions for employment creation right. Policymakers often work in silos, due to institutional barriers and rigidities in performance management structures, and policies are not flexible enough to tailor to local conditions. Additionally, the search for efficiency in delivering national policies and programmes can sometimes lead to a lack of attention to the negative effects that a one-size-fits-all approach can have in certain regions.

In this article, SA Business School will provide guidance on how we can bolster local employment creation and achieve sustainable inclusive growth while meeting challenges such as youth unemployment, population aging, and climate change.

The Goal Of Employment Creation In SA

The goal of all employment creation strategies is to stimulate healthy economic growth. Economists agree that annual growth between 2%–3% is sustainable. This usually requires adding 150,000 new jobs per month to employ new workers entering the labour force. In a free market economy, the government does not need to do anything when growth is healthy; capitalism encourages small businesses to compete, thereby creating better ways to meet consumers’ needs.

 

Even a healthy economy is subject to the bubbles and busts of the business cycle. When the economy contracts into a recession, the government and adult learning institutions like SA Business School must create solutions to unemployment.

What Is Employability?

Employability is the lifelong, continuous process of acquiring experience, new knowledge, purposeful learning, and skills that contribute to improving your marketability for enhancing your potential to obtain and maintain employment through different shifts in the labour market. We base this on a set of individual characteristics which you must have for employment creation.

It is not equivalent to employment; rather, it is a prerequisite for gainful employment. Essentially, employability is your relative ability to find and stay employed, as well as make successful transitions from one job to the next, either within the same company or field or to a new one, at the discretion of an individual and as circumstances or economic conditions may dictate.

 

Employment creation will vary with economic conditions, although there are exceptions in professions insulated from economic fluctuations, such as healthcare, education, and defence sectors. It applies to almost everyone who is part of the workforce, as the ability to obtain, maintain, and switch employment over time is imperative to anyone’s survival as well as success in life.

You must have a set of skills that you can use in the workforce.

Why Employment Creation Is Important For Powerful & Sustainable Growth

The benefit of job creation is to maintain healthy economic growth. When jobs are created our economy also grows, and whenever people are working and able to provide for themselves, the morale increases, and things stabilise.

Essentially, jobs create earnings, which creates demand. 

1) Boost Economic Growth

High employment creation levels will ensure a healthy economy.

Hence, small businesses can hire additional staff, which empowers economic growth, and significant unemployment rates drop. In this way, our citizens can escape poverty as the standards of living grow over time.

Therefore, economic growth plays a crucial role in employment creation.

2) Significantly Reduces Unemployment 

High rates of employment creation will increase the amount people spend.

This will cause a positive multiplier effect which helps to increase economic growth. Job creation reduces unemployment and allows more people to work. SA Business School SA has a program that addresses our country’s skills shortages.

Better yet, employment creation lowers the poverty rate because employed people can afford to provide for their children and themselves.

3) Prevents Crime

Unfortunately, there are certain individuals who might resort to crimes like theft, robbery, and burglary to support the cost of drug abuse or other reasons when they do not earn an income.

That is why employment creation is so important, as it helps to reduce crimes since people will be working and receiving better income. As such, they will not resort to drug misuse because they will have better things to do with their lives. These people will not end up living on the street committing crimes and robbing people either, or will they be homeless. 

4) Supports Lifelong Development Of Relevant Skills

Local areas require a skilled workforce, which is less expendable, more adaptable to change, and can transfer between economic sectors.

This requires providing appropriate skills development opportunities for individuals as well as information on where new job opportunities will be in the future.

Lifelong learning systems and involving employers in designing and implementing training can boost skills development and employment creation.

5) Helps Areas Move Out Of The Low Skills Trap

There is a considerable local variation in employer demand for skills.

Certain areas are stuck in a ‘low-skills equilibrium,’ where local employers offer low‑skilled jobs and operate in low‑cost markets, so there are hardly high-quality jobs available.

 

In such regions, technical assistance, management training, and embedding skills policies in broader mechanisms for business support can encourage demand for higher levels of skills.

6) Tackle Labour Market Exclusion

Disadvantaged groups, such as young people not in education, employment, or training (NEET), often face multifaceted employment barriers, requiring targeted support to ensure that no individuals or communities are left behind.

7) Smooth Transition To A Green Economy

The move towards a greener economy will bring both challenges and opportunities, including the transition of workers from one sector to another and economic diversification into new forms of eco‑innovation.

Education and training systems should be flexible enough to adapt to changing local needs and to help workers in declining sectors transfer to emerging niches in the green economy.

8) Adopt New Approaches To Economic Development

Local areas are changing their growth and investment strategies, exploiting new markets and alternative sources of finance.

Given that growth is increasingly driven by knowledge‑based capital, a common focus is building partnerships between universities, local economic agencies, and companies to promote knowledge‑sharing.

Local development systems should leverage all available resources, expertise, and experience by including a variety of stakeholders (public and private sector organisations; citizens and businesses; knowledge‑based institutions, and development agencies and companies).

Using evidence‑based approaches is critical to addressing both the immediate barriers to employment and the root causes of long‑term labour market exclusion.

Learn Today, Lead Tomorrow

Above all, the benefits of employment creation help the economy to grow and stabilise and reduce poverty. The more people that work – the better. Less people will be homeless or resort to drug addiction, and more will provide for themselves.

In conclusion, employment creation can help us in different ways, rather than just providing financial stability and personal growth. The importance of employment creation is a journey of self-discovery and sustainable growth as well.

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