CapaCiTi career accelerator and Centrax Systems rise to youth job entry challenge

Nompumelelo Mndebele, Solutions Lead at Centrax Systems.

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The youth are making important contributions as productive workers in our current day as entrepreneurs, consumers, citizens, members of society and agents of change. All too often, though, their full potential is not realised due to the severe lack of access to productive and decent job opportunities that meet their aspirations and match their qualifications.

The rise of career accelerators across the globe and South Africa is closing the gap somewhat in ensuring that many young people's careers are kick-started in our modern economy and for supporting businesses to provide in-house employee training and digital opportunities.

Lele Msimango, co-owner and COO at Centrax Systems, states: "Career accelerators can help SMEs and enterprise organisations access post-graduate resources with job-ready skills at no cost for at least three to six months, which is a long job interview that produces tangible evidence of candidates' potential. Such programmes can help employees to gain the needed work/office life experience. The employer may then select a candidate who will be culture ready and have the potential to grow within the enterprise and add value to the organisation."

Partnering with a career accelerator

Career accelerators have the potential to provide our youth with opportunities to prepare for careers in the modern economy through real-world career support, while enabling businesses that collaborate with them to work alongside talented young minds from diverse backgrounds.

Accelerators are instrumental in providing "future of work" based experience for youth to learn basic yet essential skills and innovative methods of the working world, receive training on digital savviness and attain tools used by goal-oriented and forward-thinking organisations.

Organisations have the opportunity to partner with an accelerator from the early stages of the candidate onboarding, which will allow them to influence and shape the candidate's skills and thinking, and feed their objectives and vision.

Centrax and Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi) College teaming up for change

At the height of the pandemic's peak, Centrax Systems and Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi) began an internship programme to expose its candidates to online learning courses that contain suites of business-focused modules. These range from sales and marketing, finance, operations, human resources and projects, collaboration and productivity, and lastly, an entire array of IT courses such as website, app development and robotic process automation just to name a few. Each of these learning outcomes propels each candidate exponentially and qualifies them for their career journey beyond the internship.

Centrax as the incubator and CiTi as the accelerator have objectives to provide meaningful work experience through mentoring, coaching and on-the-job training to the youth. Interns would be involved in various projects, be they customer or internal projects, as the goal of the programme is to encourage more young people to learn these new skills and gain valuable workplace experience, which will improve their resumes, placing them ahead of the crowd and thus bettering their chances of finding long-term employment.

Through this partnership, Centrax and CiTi established a Cloud Centre of Excellence to focus on building business and technical skills for cloud migration and digital business transformation and, as a result, 10 candidates are today employed at Centrax Systems in various disciplines. This centre is up to date, built on the latest technologies and focuses on proactively building competency and providing cutting-edge solutions to our customers.

"The Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi) and Centrax partnership has helped me to start my career in digital technologies at Centrax Systems and, in just under two years, I have grown in my career. As of today, I oversee the solutions engineering stream, which is responsible for developing technical specifications for customers' cloud migration requirements," says Nompumelelo Mndebele, Solutions Lead at Centrax Systems.