During my time working at South African Breweries (SAB), I watched young graduates arrive on the factory floor holding hard-earned chemistry degrees. They possessed brilliant theoretical minds, understanding molecular bonds and complex reactions on paper. Yet, when a critical machine on the production line broke down, those degrees often couldn’t get the line moving again.
The people who kept the heart of the operation beating were the artisans. They didn’t hold four-year university qualifications, but they possessed years of practical, vocational experience. They understood the mechanics and the immediate problem-solving required to keep a complex operation running – and some were earning more than the graduates standing beside them.
This experience didn’t diminish the value of a chemistry degree – rather, it exposed a systemic blind spot. We have built an educational hierarchy premised on prestige rather than practicality. In doing so, we have created a generational promise that a university degree is the sole path to a prosperous life. But out in the real world, the ground has shifted. Today, we face a disconnect between what the classroom promises and what the economy demands – and needs.
Bridging this gap calls for a shift in how we define educational success, prioritising a model that puts economic utility front and centre.
Fit-for-purpose, the first instance
When education is viewed through the lens of utility, the organising question changes. It is not about whether a university degree is “better” than a vocational certificate but about what determines whether a degree, diploma, certificate, artisanal pathway, or entrepreneurship is the right decision for a specific individual and a specific market?
When the conversation is focussed about fit-for-purpose, we stop treating vocational training as a “fallback plan” for those who missed out on university, or somehow a lesser path. Instead, we then recognise that vocational training is a vibrant, high-value, future-proof career option.
Currently, our system over-produces theorists and under-produces builders. While thousands of university graduates enter saturated job markets with degrees but no job prospects, lucrative vocational, artisan and emerging tech sectors face critical skills shortages. True educational success must be measured by utility – does this educational pathway actually equip a young person to participate meaningfully in the economy?
The Grade 9 utility trap
This misdirection, I’d argue, is driven by the rigid structures of career guidance in our schooling system. In Grade 9, fifteen-year-olds are forced to make subject choices that effectively lock them into specific academic tracks for the rest of their working lives.
Currently, our career-guidance model fails to solve for long-term economic utility in three distinct ways. In the first instance, we lean heavily on psychometric tests, operating under the assumption that a test score at 15 can predict a career at 45. It can’t. A test tells us nothing about a young person’s emotional intelligence, resilience, adaptability or entrepreneurial drive – the exact traits required to navigate a fluid, tech-driven economy where the average career involves constant pivots.
Secondly, for a learner in a township or rural community, career exposure is often limited to what they see in their immediate surroundings or on television – such as police officers, teachers or doctors. A data scientist or mechatronics engineer, for example, is a concept that has never entered their daily context. Thirdly, a learner who struggles with rote learning might possess exactly the spatial awareness, curiosity, and analytical grit required to become an exceptional automation technician or a specialised welder. Yet, our career guidance doesn’t evaluate utility.
At Grade 9, young people are not being asked what they want to achieve, what the actual economic utility of their chosen pathway is, and how that analysis must evolve with them over time. Career guidance must be a continuous service, just as relevant to a 14-year-old as it is to a 50-year-old recalibrating their career.
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Career exploration for the Netflix generation
This is the problem we set out to solve when we founded Young Aspiring Thinkers (YAT) in 2019. Like most organisations trying to fix a structural problem with limited resources, we have nearly folded more than once, buffeted by the unpredictable rhythm of funding cycles. What kept us going was a conviction that the gap between classroom and career was only going to widen, and that someone needed to build the bridge.
That conviction sharpened considerably after I completed a master’s degree in AI and analytics at NYU in 2022. It became clear that the tools now existed to do career guidance properly, at scale, and personalised to the individual. So we built it that way. Think of it as career exploration for the Netflix generation.
Instead of browsing shows, learners browse career options. Instead of movie trailers, they get a “trailer” for a career – a real, day-in-the-life look at what a quantity surveyor, a mechatronics engineer or a sound designer actually does. From there, they choose a pathway, be it vocational, entrepreneurial, traditional academic or an emerging field. That pathway then connects directly to an economic opportunity in the form of a job, a bursary or a funding stream. We can’t allow career guidance to end at a personality quiz.
Underpinning this is an AI recommendation algorithm modelled on the same principle Netflix uses to suggest your next series – it learns from interest and willingness to explore, not from academic performance. It is, deliberately, a psychometric-free way of listening to a young person. The goal is to build an end-to-end pathway for the whole journey – from a learner’s first questions about who they might become, through to their first application and ultimately their first meaningful economic opportunity.
Designing for the real economy
To correct our course at a national level, we must design career guidance and educational pathways based on live market data, national skills deficits and future economic growth sectors. It requires telling young people the truth about where the opportunities actually are.
For instance, South Africa’s agricultural sector, for instance, has funding and growth opportunities but continues to struggle to attract sufficient interest, while many young people remain concentrated in a narrow band of familiar pathways where entry-level opportunities cannot absorb everyone seeking work.
Germany offers a useful model: vocational and skilled-trade pathways are formally recognised, funded and connected to clear routes for professional advancement and entrepreneurship.
The degree dilemma is entirely within our power to solve. By aligning career guidance with real-world utility, celebrating diverse pathways and prioritising fit-for-purpose opportunities over institutional prestige, we can transform a generation of anxious job-seekers into a formidable force of skilled, economically secure builders.
- Monewa Matlwa, Managing Director of Young Aspiring Thinkers (YAT)
