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Looming Deadlines For Financial Year-End

Year-end deadlines are quickly approaching, and now is the time to get your BBBEE Scorecard in order, if you haven’t already. We understand that this year has quickly passed. The good news though is that it’s not too late to meet your training deadlines.

Meeting your BBBEE scorecard targets is critical to reaching your level, and potentially scoring higher. Failure to meet your targets can very likely result in the loss of clients and general business.

How Can My Company Meet Its Skills Development Target?

Learnerships are often your best option, and we’ll explain why. Working with an accredited learnership programme, you are able to put your learners on your payroll and calculate any spend attributed to the training (actual training costs, travel, books, etc.) to claim as expenditure. This can also include stipend paid to learners. 

At the end of the measurement period, if you retain a certain number of those learners, you can earn up to five bonus points towards your BBBEE scorecard. This doesn’t necessarily mean that retention has to remain within your company, rather you simply need to place learners in a job they’ve received as a result of your intervention. Be sure to submit a contract and payslip to prove they have been employed to qualify for retention bonus points.

Lack of capacity is often unavoidable. Here’s where we can come in… 

How Can Summit Make This Process Easier for You?

Summit not only assists with recruitment and the training of learnership programs, but we also assist you with placing your learners in jobs, and therefore, help you maximise on your skills development.

More About YouthLink Platform

Summit has developed an online platform to assist with placements: YouthLink. On this platform we host Placement Partners who upload the positions they have available, and a pool of learners to be matched with these jobs. 

There are two parts to the platform:

  1. Work Integrated Learner (WIL)

This is the phase of the learner’s training during which they are required to be placed in a relevant work environment, and given opportunities to gain experience while accumulating practical hours for their resumes. 

This is the perfect opportunity for Placement Partners to take advantage of the additional resources available to them. It is  also an ideal “working-interview-model” where promising candidates can be identified and offered suitable vacancies, contributing to retention bonus points.

  1. Placements

Once the learners have completed their WIL and final examinations, and found competent, it’s time to find suitable employment. Since Summit works with a large number of learners, we identified the need for a platform from which we can collect and manage vacancy-related information from Placement Partners. 

We essentially then function as a Recruitment Agency for a selection of companies within the areas we operate in. This service is complimentary and inspired the creation of YouthLink.

Don’t Have Capacity to Host Learners? Summit Can Assist, See How:

If you want to spend on a learnership, but don’t have the capacity to host learners, you can take on a role as lead employer. This entails financing the training, but not necessarily hosting the training yourself. 

In cases like these, we will assist you with all project management. We’ll recruit learners who are in line with your spend per demographic, create timesheets, find host employers who have capacity and would benefit from the extra hands, and thereafter keep in close communication with the host on your behalf.

What if We’ve Run Out of Time to Train?

Many businesses don’t know that their training spend can be recognised, even if the learnership runs into the new financial year. As long as you pay your training spend to be recognised in the financial year and register your learners on the relevant SETA, the learnership can run over into the next financial year.