Recognising that South Africa’s youth must be presented with avenues to participate in the global digital economy, impact sourcing specialist CareerBox Africa has created the CareerBox Africa Innovation hub in Umhlanga, Durban.
The global digital economy plays an important part in giving rise to innovative new ventures that will create sustainable employment for young Africans. Budding young entrepreneurs must be given every opportunity to participate in the digital economy, both locally and globally, to build a more prosperous future for everyone.
CareerBox is devoted to delivering distinctive training and employment prospects to ambitious and skilled young individuals hailing from underprivileged circumstances. While the bulk of CareerBox’s focus is on helping young people who lack a tertiary education to find employment in the BPO sector, the company has noticed that a number of university graduates are also struggling to secure employment.
A degree is not a guarantee
Unfortunately, a university degree is not a guarantee of employment – research shows that new graduates can struggle to find work, with their lack of foundational workplace skills cited as one of the reasons for this. However, interns are far more likely to find permanent employment because of valuable exposure to a real-world work environment.
With limited internship opportunities available locally for strong digital and tech graduates, CareerBox identified the opportunity to help bright young digital and tech graduates find global internship opportunities, working with international organisation TalentMatch, part of the Global Employment Challenge (GEC). The GEC identifies unemployed tertiary-qualified graduates to match to internship opportunities with global companies, with the goal of finding full-time employment for 10 million Africans.
Internship experience is valuable
Research shows that real-life, hands-on industry experience is the most valuable way for graduates to obtain meaningful career-related employment. CareerBox not only helps find qualified graduates for the programme. Recognising that many of these talented graduates lack the infrastructure in their home environments that would enable them to take full advantage of these opportunities, it developed the CareerBox Africa Innovation Hub in partnership with business process outsourcing (BPO) industry leader CCI South Africa.
The CareerBox AI Hub is a state-of-the-art digitally enabled workspace where the successfully placed students have access to tools such as computers and a high-speed internet connection that enables them to work in a focused environment. By doing so, these graduates have opportunities with international organisations actively seeking talent.
Creating further opportunities
The CareerBox AI Hub also aims to create exceptional opportunities for AI enthusiasts and young entrepreneurs. CareerBox is working to grant these entrepreneurs access to the AI Hub premises where they will have the opportunity immerse themselves in cutting-edge AI technologies and collaborate on meaningful projects with CareerBox and CCI South Africa. The Hub intends to foster an environment of innovation and collaboration that will further enhance these young entrepreneurs’ expertise and potential contributions to the field of AI with a reliable, available and collaborative workspaces at no cost, allowing them to focus on their development and the delivery of excellence.
“CareerBox Africa is resolute in our commitment to unleash the untapped capabilities of young Africans. We are proud to play a role in supporting our unemployed young graduates. Through our support of TalentMatch, our promising youth can now work for prestigious companies while being based in our CareerBox AI Hub in Africa,” says Lizelle Strydom, Managing Director of CareerBox Africa.
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