Career Connect Group (CCG), a social enterprise registered in 2018 to address a key gap in the career educational market, has partnered with New Zealand-based software developer Career Central to bring its integrative online Student Career Pathway Management platform to South African secondary schools.
With more than 150,000 Australasian students engaging online with the platform, Career Connect Group was impressed with the intuitive design, customisation options and analytics the portal offers. It enables students to complete modules on their skills, personal qualities, career values, interests and work exposure as well as access career quizzes and build a CV online. Students can also undertake future-focused planning around subject selection, post-school courses and study, employability skills, goal setting and school leaver readiness. School staff have full administrative access to view student content, study and career plans, and quiz results, as well as advanced statistics, lists, data reporting, interview notes and messaging functionality.
Currently, the only company to provide this platform in Africa, Career Connect Group aims to transform career education within South Africa by providing a unique, one-stop career educational service. With the ongoing struggle of Covid-19, schools find it particularly difficult to deliver adequate life orientation course material via a digital classroom, resulting in students feeling overwhelmed and uncertain of their futures, lacking clarity and access to current information for the next phase of their education and futures.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with the CCG team to bring Career Central to South Africa. They have proven experience in career education and are developing a powerful suite of products and services to help them achieve their vision of transforming inclusive career education for South African youth,” says Sue Hancock, managing director at Career Central Limited.
Career Central has been operating in New Zealand since 2012 and Australia since 2019 with a proven track record of Impact in career knowledge development and management for schools.
Unesco and a range of other international bodies described career guidance as “services, which help people of any age to manage their careers and to make the educational, training and occupational choices that are right for them”. They concluded by saying that career guidance “acts as a lubricant for developing and nurturing human talent to power innovation, creativity and competitiveness and that ‘the majority of high-quality evaluations of career guidance activities show evidence of positive economic, education and social outcomes."
“In 2020, we saw the devastating impact of a global pandemic. With unemployment rates soaring in South Africa, youth aged 15-24 are amongst the highest at 63,3% and make up an increasingly vulnerable population group in our country. Access to quality education remains out of reach for most young people yet for every year that we celebrate a high matric pass rate, there is an increase in the number of young people who join the long queue of unemployment and poverty. We want to help change this narrative. “– Jenni Higgs, founder and managing director at Career Connect Group
At Career Connect Group, we focus on engaging with youth and schools regarding career planning and development and the shortfalls of access to current career information and market trends. Some of our services and products that we offer are:
