Thabo Mashongoane | May 28, 2025
Employment equity regulations can be seen as a catalyst for investment in people, people, institutions, and long-term prosperity.
SA reached a critical moment on its journey of change. The new Official Gazette Employment Equity (EE) regulations designed to increase the number of sector-wide representation by 2030 mark an important step towards a more inclusive economy. However, achieving these ambitious goals requires more than a compliance checklist or short-term revisions. It requires deep and sustainable investment in skill development.
As someone who has spent more than 40 years in vocational education and training and started his own career as a craftsman, I have found that unsuccessful transformations that are not rooted in skills. Equity cannot exist in a vacuum. It must be supported by a deliberate, coordinated approach to workforce development, especially in technically demanding sectors such as mining and manufacturing.
For businesses navigating the EE landscape, the starting point must be a robust human resource development strategy. This means assessing training pipelines, internal capabilities, and future role preparation beyond demographic goals. EE cannot be reduced to adopting statistics. It must be to enable South Africans to grow within their roles and industry.
At the Mining Qualifications Bureau (MQA), learning, internships and craftsman development programs bring real results. Feedback from Minerals Council SA and other stakeholders confirm that our interventions have helped mines improve productivity, accelerate onboarding and, decisively, reduce workplace incidents. When workers are properly trained, they are theoretical and practically more safe and also improve operational performance. This is not an abstract policy. That is a life-life reality in mining operations across the country.
Certainly, EE targets present challenges. Especially in an industry that has been historically shaped by exclusion. In many eyes, mining remains a male-dominated, physically demanding space. But that's changing. Automation, digitization and innovation are redefineing work on the ground. Once strength-dependent roles required analytical and digital expertise. This shift creates opportunities to welcome more women, disabled and young people into the sector. Rather than hiring tokens, he has the ability to move the industry forward as a geologist, engineer and safety expert.
Therefore, the Technical & Vocational Education & Training (TVET) system is extremely important for our future. MQA invests more than R250,000 each year to support students at TVET institutions. Still, vocational education continues to be considered the second tier of the university's pathway. This way of thinking has to be shifted. For all engineers in the mining value chain, the sector needs up to 15 craftsmen. These are people who continue to operate, maintain safety standards and apply innovation in real time. Raising TVET University, providing appropriate resources and embedding it in its workforce plans is not just a good policy, but a national order.
Conversion is not achieved with silos. Meeting the EE goals for 2030 requires coordination of government, industry, sector education and training institutions (SETAS), and educational institutions as a whole. Encouraged, platforms like the SETA Sector Integrated HR Development Strategies are beginning to bridge these divisions, ensuring knowledge and capabilities flow across the sector. For small employers without infrastructure, these types of partnerships are essential to developing only talent pipelines.
At MQA, our mission is not only to drive demographic change, but to build capacity, safety and dignity across mining workers. Our vision is a responsive system that understands the evolving demands of the sector, prepares workers for modern roles, and reduces the human costs of undertraining.
Don't view new EE regulations as a compliance burden. Let's embrace them as catalysts for people, institutions and investments in long-term prosperity.
If transformation is skilled, it moves from policy goals to living economic reality.
“Disclaimer – the views and opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author and are not necessarily those of the Bee Room.”
