In the last six months, I have sifted through around 1000 applications from unemployed engineering graduates to choose eight. Then, out of the blue, I received a resume from an old business acquaintance. His son has graduated with a degree in engineering at the end of last year, but has still not managed to find employment. The situation is severely impacting his emotional health. This made me reflect on the situation.
South Africa’s engineering unemployment problem is often laid squarely at the door of universities. The argument is familiar: our institutions produce graduates with strong technical skills but little practical readiness for the world of work. While there is some truth in this criticism, it is incomplete, and frankly too convenient.
The failure to translate engineering skills into economic impact is not the responsibility of education alone. It is the result of three reinforcing failures: policy decisions that weakened vocational pathways, an education system detached from enterprise, and a society that has quietly declared only one definition of success.
Together, these forces have left young engineers highly trained, deeply constrained, and poorly prepared for the economic reality they face.
The message we sent − and keep sending
For years, government policy progressively reduced emphasis, funding and prestige associated with vocational education, artisan school and technical colleges. While these institutions still exist, they do so in an environment where they are clearly positioned as a second choice.
The message, whether intentional or not, is unmistakable: Working with your hands, building things and learning through making means failure.
Getting a degree is success
This has had devastating long-term consequences. Artisan pathways, which should have stood alongside engineering as complementary and equal, were diminished in public perception. The result was the collapse of the technical ecosystem that engineering depends on.
Engineering cannot function in isolation. It requires artisans, technicians, technologists and practical builders. By undermining vocational education, we broke the bridge between design and execution, and then wondered why so many graduates struggle to find relevance.
A society obsessed with corporate validation
Compounding this policy failure is a deeply entrenched societal belief that success means getting a degree and being employed by a large corporate.
Parents push children toward universities not because it suits their aptitude, but because it signals status. Schools reinforce this aspiration. Universities institutionalise it. Industry inadvertently validates it by focusing recruitment on narrow academic markers like degrees.
Almost nobody tells young people that:
• Building something is success
• Solving practical problems is success
• Owning a small, technically sound business is success
• Employing others is success
Instead, we have conditioned an entire generation to believe that unless a corporate employer accepts them, they have failed − regardless of capability.
This belief is particularly destructive in today’s South Africa, where corporate employment growth simply cannot keep pace with graduate output.
Engineering education did not create this alone
Engineering faculties are not blameless, but they are operating inside a system that steers outcomes long before students reach university. By the time engineering students graduate, they have been shaped by:
• A schooling system that prizes academic abstraction over making
• A policy environment that sidelined vocational excellence
• A society that equates employment with worth
• An economy that cannot offer mass absorption into industry
In this context, universities continued to prepare engineers for jobs that were already disappearing, not because they were negligent, but because no one redefined the destination.
Skills without agency
The result is a tragic paradox. We graduate engineers with:
• Strong analytical ability
• Excellent problem solving skills
• Sound technical foundations
• The ability to innovate and design
Yet many lack agency: the belief and capability to create their own economic opportunity. Most have never been taught how to:
• Start a professional practice
• Price engineering work
• Manage cash flow and risk
• Navigate contracts and liability
• Operate as an independent economic actor
Entrepreneurship is treated as an add-on, a personality trait, or something ‘other people do’. For engineers, it should be a core competency, especially in a stagnant economy.
The economy will not save them
We must confront another uncomfortable truth: The South African economy will not, in the foreseeable future, create enough formal engineering jobs to absorb all graduates. Waiting for industry to grow its way out of this problem is wishful thinking. Think about Arcelor Mittal, Goodyear and Tongaat Hulett closing plants and businesses in the past year. Job opportunities are reducing, not increasing. If young engineers are to thrive, they must be able to create work, not just compete for it.
Rehabilitating enterprise and dignity in building
This requires a fundamental narrative shift. We must restore dignity and value to:
• Vocational education
• Craft and making
• Small businesses
• Technical entrepreneurship
• Ownership over employment
Engineering education should not exist above this ecosystem, it should sit within it. Engineers should graduate understanding that starting a small consultancy, partnering with artisans or building niche technical services is not a fallback plan. It is a legitimate, powerful economic contribution. Likewise, government policy must recognise that starving vocational education while expanding academic throughput does not create prosperity, it creates imbalance.
Redefining success
Success in engineering must no longer be defined by where you are employed, but by the value you create. An engineer who builds a small firm that employs five people is not less successful than another employed by a multinational. In many cases, they are far more economically impactful. South Africa needs engineers who can operate with independence, commercial awareness and confidence across the full technical value chain.
A shared responsibility
This is not a call to assign blame. It is a call to accept responsibility collectively.
• Government must reinvest in vocational excellence and parity of esteem.
• Universities must embed enterprise thinking into engineering education.
• Industry must value capability over pedigree.
• Society must stop equating dignity with corporate employment.
Until we correct all these, we will continue to fail young engineers, not because they lack skills, but because we have taught them to measure success by standards the economy can no longer meet. This is not an educational problem alone, it’s a national one.
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