By Dr. Hoosen Rasool

Introduction


Globalisation, emerging technologies, constant firm-level re-engineering, regulatory and workforce pressures, managing change and meeting world-class performance standards in terms of productivity, price, quality, design and innovation are some of the major challenges facing the local clothing and textiles sector as it adjusts to a global quota-free trade landscape.

Meeting these challenges require an increasingly disproportionate reliance on knowledge-intensity, skills and capabilities of the workforce from CEO to sweeper. Whether our business strategies rely on marketing know how, technology, price, logistics, innovation or scale economies, success can only be achieved through a highly skilled, motivated and globally competitive workforce - it is people that make things happen in firms.

Whilst, there is always a place for low-end and intermediate skills in the sector, given the labour-intensive nature of manual work (something government should note in view of our unemployment crisis), the proportion of highly skilled workers is likely to grow sharply in comparison to unskilled worker in order to satisfy sophisticated consumer preferences, meet delivery targets, offset unit labour costs and ultimately meet price points in the marketplace - in other words, to stay in business.

Against this backdrop of changes fuelled by technological advancements, specialised skills development interventions are needed to draw this sector into a different development trajectory.

Re-engineering

The stark reality is that firms in this sector are becoming smaller, flatter, and meaner, and doing whatever is necessary to stay in business. Large clothing and textiles firms, as part of a growing trend, are re-engineering themselves into a number of smaller interlocking business units to acquire market agility. It is therefore not surprising for manufacturing firms to be manufacturers of some product lines, importers of others and wholesalers, all at the same time.

This multiplicity of roles is giving rise to more complex organisational architectures in firms and presenting a plethora of new skills development opportunities beyond the traditional offering of learnerships, apprenticeships and technical training, which is also vitally important to improve the competitive capability of firms in the sector.

Value Chain

Mastery of the value chain is assuming greater prominence in all activities of the firm with a view to cut costs and improves quality at every point in the activity chain. Success or failure in firms is now measured by the speed of movement of raw materials from the time it reaches the gate of the firm to the time the finished product lands on the customer's doorstep.

These imperatives require complex managerial skills to enable firms to constantly re-engineer structures and improve processes in response to internal and external market changes. Managers must learn to create and manage seamless interfaces between human resources, technology, finance, procurement, logistics, operations, marketing and sales and customer service as part of their daily tasks. They also need the skills to lock into global supply chains.

Hierarchies

As firms downsize, traditional hierarchies are replaced by longer control spans. Managers and supervisors need to be equipped with skills that rely more on co-ordination and participation than on inspection and control. Likewise, operators need to be trained to accept greater responsibility for individual performance, display sound judgment, work in self-directed teams and offer solutions to problems on the production floor. This is new ground for training in a sector accustomed to Fordist manufacturing practices.

Work

In this new climate, firms need to organise around work, not jobs. The workforce should be multi-skilled with fewer workers doing more work. Workers should rotate around different projects. Managers should be enskilled to guide projects, measure performance, encourage innovation, manage talent and communicate effectively. This also presents new skills development challenges and requires a fundamentally different battery of skills for managers and workers alike.

Management

Arguably one of the greatest skills development challenges for the sector lies in the field of management training and development. The rising complexity and speed of business, productivity pressures, innovation and process upgrading, chain management, strategy formulation, logistics, information management and people development are just some of the areas that require specialised training and development interventions for managers to meet the demands of modern business.

Constraints

There are several constraints that appear to limit our chances of addressing the skills development challenges alluded to above.

First, the CTFL SETA has a very limited income. It can disburse in the region of around R42 million a year in skills levy grant rebates to firms. Hardly enough to upgrade a national workforce of around 160 000 formal workers in the sector. Second, the prescriptive nature of the grant funding regulations compels the SETA to spend scarce resources in areas of marginal importance to the specific needs of this sector. Third, the high cost of quality management development training delivered by only a limited number of institutions in South Africa is simply unaffordable to the rank and file in this sector. In contrast, there are any number of suspect quality management training programmes in the local market that tend to do more harm than good. For the most part, our educational institutions are simply not responding in a proactive and transformative way to providing high quality, accessible and affordable programmes that contribute to the national challenge decisively.

If the supply side support is neither affordable nor sufficient, then the sector has no option but to explore new avenues for addressing its needs. But this becomes yet another steep challenge for a sector that already has more than its fair share of challenges.