“Education is the key to success” — but too many graduates can’t find work or start a business. BCM’s plan starts with a different question.

Young South Africans are told, consistently, that education is the key to success. For a growing number of graduates, that promise doesn’t match lived experience — qualifications don’t translate into jobs, and even those with the will to start a business often lack the collateral to secure a loan to do it.

BCM’s Sixth Cornerstone, Human Resource Development and Technological Advancement, starts from that gap rather than around it. The centrepiece of the policy is a shift toward vocation-oriented tertiary education — training in fields like bricklaying, plumbing and welding, delivered through a structured model of six months of study paired with six months of practical, on-the-job experience, so that a qualification arrives with proven, employable skill attached to it.

The policy extends the same logic to national service: young people completing a period of military subscription would leave with a specialised, transferable skill, not just service experience. On funding, BCM proposes routing NSFAS-equivalent support directly to tertiary institutions rather than through layers of administration, on the basis that this allows more students to be funded for the same national spend. And to make sure this training has somewhere to go once it’s complete, the policy commits to building at least one technological centre per province — anchoring skills development in the same regions where young people actually live, rather than concentrating opportunity in a handful of major cities.

None of this replaces academic education — it sits alongside it, aimed squarely at the part of the youth unemployment crisis that a university degree alone hasn’t solved.