SETAs are organisations established to facilitate skills development in specific economic sectors by ensuring access to skills development opportunities to those individuals employed in those sectors, or those wanting to be employed in those specific sectors. There are at present 21 SETAs operational in South Africa. The Fibre Processing and Manufacturing (FP&M) SETA was established by the Minister of Higher Education and Training on 1 April 2011 after government took a decision to cluster sectors in order to strengthen value-chain linkages between related industries. The FP&M SETA mandate is:
• to provide skills development services to the clothing, footwear, forestry, furniture, general goods, leather, packaging, print media, printing, publishing, pulp and paper, textiles and wood products sectors;
• to implement the objectives of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS III); and
• to ensure that people obtain the critical or scarce skills that are needed to build the capacity of the sector to become economically sustainable and globally competitive. The intention of NSDS III is to-
• increase access to training and skills development opportunities;
• transform inequities linked to class, race, gender, age and disability;
• address the challenges of skills shortages and mismatches;
• improve productivity in the economy; and
• increase the focus on skills development linked to rural development. The value added by SETAs is their understanding of labour market issues in their respective industrial and economic sectors. SETAs must “create interventions and shape solutions that address skills needs within their sectors”. Central to the objectives of the NSDS III is improved placement of both students and graduates, especially from the Technical, Vocational Educational and Training Institutions (TVETs), Universities and Universities of Technology. There is no value in training people if they are not given the opportunity to apply the skills they have learnt in the workplace. But skills development is not just for young people starting their first jobs - the skills of people already in jobs must also be enhanced. NSDS III also encourages the training of employed workers in order to improve overall productivity and to address skills imbalances within the workforce and the labour market.
