When we started building in this sector, one belief shaped everything: the sooner a young person starts, the better they do. More exposure, more repetition, more feedback, more development. Every experience builds on the last: skills, confidence, a reputation, and the income that follows.
In the office, we called it the time value of talent.
We believed it partly because startups are built that way too, fast and agile, working against the clock, because speed is often the only real advantage we have. But mostly we believed it because we'd seen it: young people, given opportunities, compound their experiences. That was us as founders.
Sticking with the theme of radical accountability, spending nine years working with incredible people across this ecosystem has also left us all, on some days, thinking this is such a bad idea. The hard part isn't that developing talent takes time. It does, and that's fine. The hard part is that the ecosystem around talent moves slower than the talent needs it to, so instead of compounding their experiences, they're waiting.
And it gives this uncomfortable feeling that this ecosystem isn't playing to win. We're playing not to lose, like the first half of Bafana v Mexico, World Cup 2026. And we are all guilty of it. Let me explain what I mean.
The operating framework in this sector is largely driven by compliance when it could be driven by growth. I want to be careful here, because this isn't a criticism, it's an observation. The majority of funds that flow through this sector are B-BBEE, developmental, and philanthropic, and good governance and compliance aren't optional. They're absolutely necessary. No market is possible without them.
But when compliance leads, it carries a built-in ceiling. When you build something to satisfy a requirement, you build something that stops the moment the requirement is met: hit the target, report, close, don't lose. Even the most progressive funders are still optimising efficiency against a fixed target, and too often that means more red tape, not fewer barriers.
So solutions that should reach millions reach thousands. Not because the need stops there, the need is overwhelming, but because the model stops there. The ceiling is set before a single learner walks through the door.
Picture it plainly: a programme has funding for a thousand learners and receives fifty thousand applications. What happens to the other forty-nine thousand? They're told to wait; for the next intake, the next budget cycle, a revised mandate. Six months. A year. And in a world where skills are losing their value faster than before, six months isn't a pause. It's an opportunity cost.
This is the part I keep coming back to, because it's the heart of it. The young person who finishes one learning intervention is rarely "done," rarely "ready to work." They've closed some gaps and discovered others. What they need next is to keep moving, carrying momentum into the next thing that supports their development and learning. Then a bit of work, then more learning.
The world of work is no longer linear. It's circular: learn, work, upskill, continuously in line with market demand.
But our ecosystem is fragmented. It’s built as a series of disconnected, separately-funded interventions, not as a connected and continuous pathway. So the learner with momentum hits a wall, not because they've stopped being capable, but because the next step hasn't been identified, funded, or approved yet. Their momentum dies in the gap between interventions.
That gap is where we lose people. And it's where the cost becomes clearest.
According to Stats SA, of the 4.8 million unemployed youth in early 2025, 58.7% had never held a job. Nearly six in ten are still waiting for their first opportunity to build experience.
So talent has a time value. A young person developing now is worth more than the same person starting next year, because skills compound, digital fluency compounds, confidence compounds, culture compounds. Every month they're moving, their experience grows. Every month they're waiting is a missed opportunity, with 45.6% of youth aged 15–34 not in Employment, Education or Training (QLFS, 2026:Q1).
And the clock is speeding up. A generation ago, a learned skill stayed useful for decades. Today, the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that nearly 40% of workers' core skills will be transformed or outdated by 2030, while enterprise software platforms release major updates quarterly.
So continuous learning stops being a buzzword and becomes a market requirement for staying employable at all. The same way staying healthy means eating right and exercising, not once, but as a habit.
The old linear model of train, certify, place assumed you learned once and worked off it for years. That world is gone. And a compliance-led system of scope, fund, accredit, deliver, report, audit, review, simply cannot keep pace with a world of work that's changing so rapidly.
So the distance between the young people falling out of the system and the ones we absorb into work widens every quarter, and the slowest part of the system sets the pace for everyone. Over the decade to 2025, youth unemployment for 15–24-year-olds climbed from 50.3% to 62.4%.
So here's the question I keep asking myself: what would it look like if we brought a growth mindset to solving youth employability and the experience challenge, measuring not "how many learners in this cohort," but "how many more this month compared to last month?" What's the best next step for her tomorrow, the next best step for him the day after?
What if the rate of learning across the ecosystem wasn't annual, but quarterly, fast enough to keep pace with the changing world of work and a market demand that's a moving target? Time, used well, would multiply every rand already flowing through this sector.
So here's where I land. We can give more money to this. We can run more programmes. And we should. But money can be raised again, and programmes can be run again. Time can't. Time is the one input this problem needs most, and the one thing none of us, not the young person waiting, not the country, not us operators, ever get back.
And here's the part I sit with: many of us could be working in easier sectors, for better money and a far greater chance of success. We're here by choice, and on some days it feels like the worst idea. But we stay because someone once gave us time and opportunity, and we feel compelled to give it back.
Time can be our friend or our enemy, because the time value of talent compounds both ways. Start early, stay inclusive, and it builds a nation. Leave a generation waiting, and that same force compounds against all of us.
So if we're all going to spend the one thing we can never get back, should we not play to win? And if we're not here to win, why are we still here?
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