Gauteng MEC for Economic Development, Nkosiphendule Kolisile, celebrated the graduation of 31 postgraduate students from the CoachLab leadership programme at The Innovation Hub, in Pretoria, yesterday afternoon.
The Innovation Hub (TIH), Africa's first accredited science and technology park, is a subsidiary of the Gauteng Growth and Development Agency (GGDA), which is an agency of the Gauteng Department of Economic Development.
MEC Kolisile said the Coachlab programme has provided a crop of 188 leaders since its inception in 2001. "This programme eases the transition from tertiary education into industry, as students are exposed to innovation while they work on industry projects," he said.
CoachLab is a postgraduate leadership programme in the fields of ICT and engineering run from The Innovation Hub in Pretoria and the University of the Witwatersrand's Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering.
CoachLab is fully sponsored by MICT Seta and industry partners who use the programme as an opportunity to train graduates to employ in their core businesses. The programme runs annually from March to November and it requires the postgraduate students to work on pre-determined projects at the CoachLab, supervised by industry experts, in addition to providing students with work readiness assignments and mentorships.
Current programme sponsors include Media Information and Communication Technology (MICT) Seta, Standard Bank, Cisco Systems. Uniform SA, Epi-Use Africa, BBD, Hollard, Microsoft and its BEE partners (Home Grown Business Integration, Chillisoft and Maxxor). The academic partners are the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand and its Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering.
Acting CEO of the Gauteng Growth and Development Agency, Siphiwe Ngwenya, said: "This collaboration between the private sector, academic institutions and The Innovation Hub fits snugly into our vision to position Gauteng as a smart province by tapping into skilled graduates and boosting their leadership and business acumen."
In the year 2013/14, TIH entered into partnership with the State Information Technology Agency for the development of unemployed ICT graduates. The Innovation Hub CEO McLean Sibanda said this programme will impact 60 youth who have completed the initial three-year qualification, with the aim of exposing them to the ICT industry for future employment within the government ICT sector.
"From a pilot project launched in 2001 with support from the University of Pretoria, a private company (epi-Use) and TIH as the facilitator, the CoachLab has explanded to include a second site at Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE). This year, we are expanding to a third site, Coachlab at the Vanderbijlpark campus of the University of North West," said Sibanda.
One of the graduates from Coachlab@JCSE, Thuli Nkosi, said she has benefited a lot from the programme. "CoachLab has sharpened my skills. We were trained on leadership skills, time management, the basics of business etiquette and how to embrace diversity in the evolving world in which we live," she said. "I fully recommend the programme to other students as it offers a competitive advantage over fellow job seekers." Nkosi is employed at Hollard, one of CoachLab's sponsors.
Matome Rapasha, developer of a software-based project from Pretoria CoachLab@Hub, said: "I have gained a lot from the programme, to the extent that I am ready to be my own boss." Rapasha applied for pre-incubation at Maxum Business Incubator and has been accepted.
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