Page 19 - EngineerIt June 2021

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

faced with an alarming unemployment rate among youths aged
15-34. As a long-standing partner of government in partnership
with W&RSETA, we have teamed up to create 500 internships
for young people who recently graduated from TVET colleges
and universities. This is part of our social contract to respond to
some of the pressing socio-economic challenges plaguing our
society today.”
Peter Shoba, acting chief operating officer for W&RSETA
said: “Through this project, the W&RSETA is facilitating
partnerships between Vodacom and higher education institutions
with the aim of exposing unemployed graduates to a diverse
organisation that will provide them with experience to make them
employable, and in turn, these graduates will also share some
of the knowledge they have acquired with the employer, leading
to a mutually beneficial relationship. The W&RSETA commends
Vodacom for opening its workplaces to provide the much-
needed experience to these young people.”
The internship programme is designed to give young
graduates workplace experience as this will improve their
chances of getting employment in today’s tough job market.
Research shows that most unemployed youth in the country
are struggling to secure fulltime employment because they
don’t have work experience and this programme is designed to
plug this gap. It is born out of the desire to give youth a fighting
chance in this tough economy.
The programme will run for 12 months and graduates will
be deployed in different areas within the business such as
Vodacom stores, customer care, marketing, consumer business
unit, enterprise business unit division and ICT centres, to
mention a few. Graduates will earn a monthly stipend. The
12 month programme is designed such that graduates gain
exposure to business, strategy formulation and implementation,
and decision making at the highest levels at Vodacom. They
will be rotated to various departments on a three-month basis
to give them exposure to various areas of the business.
Successful candidates will be deployed in the following
Vodacom regions: Eastern Cape (100), Limpopo (200), KZN
(100) and Central Region (100) covering Free State and
Northern Cape provinces. Graduates are being sourced from > NVIDIA Pascal™ architecture
Letaba TVET College, Central University of Technology, with 256 NVIDIA® CUDA® cores
eThekwini College, University of Fort Hare, Ingwe TVET
College, Buffalo City TVET College, Eastcape Midland College > Dual-core NVIDIA Denver 2 64-
and Port Elizabeth College. bit CPU and quad-core Arm®
The new cohort started early this month, with the last Cortex®-A57 MPCore processor
intake starting in July 2021. The recruitment is facilitated by
complex
TVET colleges and is done based on Vodacom’s requirements
and in line with W&R SETA’s scope of work. The programme > 4GB 128-bit LPDDR4
looks to recruit interns who have studied sales, marketing,
IT, business management and communication. Successful > 16GB eMMC 5.1
candidates will undergo a comprehensive induction > 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet
programme in Vodacom, covering understanding Vodacom’s
business, its products, services and organisational culture.
“As a company with deep local roots in South Africa, we
have always recognised the need to develop local youth
with relevant tools and support mechanisms to help them
reach their true potential and destiny. It is our hope that this
programme will in some small way contribute to closing the
skills gap among youth and that local youth will take the
opportunity to apply and flourish in their chosen career paths,”
concluded Mendes. n

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