Higher Education Innovation

1. Contribute to the University Capacity Development Programme’s (UCDP) goal of transforming university curricula in South Africa to be more responsive to the contextual challenges graduates face when it comes to employment opportunities and workplace success.
2. Provide a more coherent approach to workplace-based learning (WPBL) and contribute to the WP-PSET’s key policy goal of improving relationships between education and training and the world of work.
3. Support the goals and outcomes of the National Skills Development Plan 2030 with an emphasis on empowering education and training institutions to develop appropriate interventions (in collaboration with industry) to address the demands of the future labour market and skills development.

The DHEP consists of six main features, namely: research; development of DHE models; policy restructuring; capacity development; pilot implementation; and cross-cutting evaluation. For more information on the DHEP and its activities, please visit the project’s online Info Hub.

The pace of change is accelerating. Yet, while we acknowledge that the future will be different form the past and even the present, we often based our strategies and plans on outdated assumptions. The last two years have been shrouded in angst and change.  With the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic, we seem to have forgotten that, for a while, we were set on a changing work environment based on the evolution of technology. We now embrace certain technologies for their ability to allow us to work in secure, albeit distanced circumstances. This has required of us as the current workforce to make changes to our lifestyle and it impacted significantly on our work life balance. However, the significant advances in AI, machine learning, and robotics, the resultant over supply of data and information, will require different business and governance models.

Although there are numerous predictions, it is not possible to predict what the world will look like five years into the future. Let alone ten years or more. This is a relevant question, as HE has the responsibility to prepare its current and future students towards employability, or, at least, employment readiness. The future of work, is mostly veiled behind a shroud of uncertainty, a flurry of dynamic change and a cloud of technology leaps.  This leads to questions such as “How do we prepare ourselves for such changes?”

“How do we prepare the future generations for even more changes?”  Indeed, is it possible for HE, business, government, or civil society to prepare sufficiently for huge changes that will require of us to act and behave differently and operate in vastly unknown environments. Clearly work, and the future world of work, are changing dramatically. There are two main factors that drive this. These are the continued evolution of technology through 4IR and the negative effects of the global health pandemic (COVID-19). Whereas the global pandemic enforced a culture of social distance and working from home, it also spurred high levels of technology adoption, even in instances where the power of 4IR had not been acknowledged. Governments, HEIs, industries and business organisations alike had to renavigate their current operations, find means of planning a recovery to ensure business continuity and reimagine a new normal. Two themes emerged from this. (1) Information capabilities becomes a strategic priority and (2) work changes with new advantages and new opportunities, but requiring a reskilling and reengineering of academic programmes and business processes alike.