CREATING A WORLD OF CAREER POSSIBILITIES
a kommunity career handbook story
Choosing the right career path is important, especially for young people leaving school. However, many learners in rural schools in South Africa lack access to resources that can help them to make the right decisions about their futures.
Enter the Kommunity Career Handbook (KCH), a career guide that exposes learners to a variety of careers outside of the limited opportunities they know and hear about.
Developed by Kommunity Group Projects in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch, the KCH pack includes a questionnaire that enables learners to follow the correct career path from Grade 9 to Grade 12 and beyond. It has been designed to help alleviate dropouts from either university or Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges.
Eight months ago, Nyamande High School in Mpumalanga was the recipient of the Kommunity Career Handbook. Principal Harry Moses Mathebula says the KCH has been an eye-opener for both learners and educators. “Learners are seeing possibilities outside of known career paths within their communities and the village,” he says.
Now, they are aware of other career options such as engineering, science, doctors and many more.
Harry explains that the questionnaire booklet has helped Grade 9 learners in that they are now aware of what subjects to choose in line with the career of their choice. And both teachers and parents have been hands-on in helping learners to understand the objectives and benefits of the guide.
“The challenge for Grade 12 was always accessibility to career guidance information,” says Harry. “As a result of the KCH, almost 96% of our learners have applied for tertiary learning, and some have applied online with resources from local libraries. The guide acts as a motivation to achieve better results.
“We appreciate the work and efforts by the Kommunity Foundation teams to ensure our children have access to education and knowledge,” says Harry. “We believe in this community project, and if all stakeholders work together, as we’ve seen, we can build better communities through education.”
The KCH was launched in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal in 2015, with more than 5,000 Grade 11 and Grade 12 learners as beneficiaries of the initial launch. The current three-year programme, fully funded by Pharma Dynamics, is being rolled out annually to beneficiaries in Limpopo and Mpumalanga.
