Skills Development Process

Research

The Services SETA skills development value chain starts with the identification of the nature and extent of skills demand and supply in the services sector. These skills range from technical to professional types. The process of identifying skills scarcity and provisioning is carried out through a thorough market research that involves comprehensive consultations with key role players. This information is in turn used to informs skills development plan for the Services SETA and development where warranted.

Qualification Development

Qualifications development process compliments the pipeline of skills supply by ensuring adequacy and relevance of qualifications to meet the industry demand for skills. The qualifications development process is participatory in nature, involving the industry, the Services SETA, and the Quality Council for Trades & Occupations (QCTO). The development process takes roughly up to six months. Once developed, qualifications are registered with the South African Qualifications Authority.

Accreditation

Accreditations takes place in two distinct ways. Firstly, prospective training providers may seek accreditation against registered occupational qualifications directly from the QCTO. Secondly, prospective training providers may seek accreditation against legacy qualifications, jointly from the Services SETA and QCTO. In the latter instance, the training provider must first obtain the letter of intent from the QCTO, with which they can apply for accreditation from the Services SETA.

Discretionary Grants

The Services SETA makes grant funding available during a window period in which it accepts applications from the employers. The opening of this window is advertised on the SETA website, national and community media. Read More

Mandatory Grant Funding

Mandatory grants are paid to eligible employers as an incentive for them to train their employees. An employer who wishes to access mandatory grant funding, must fulfil a set of requirements.

• Must be registered as per the Skills Development Levies Act.
• Must be up-to-date with the skills development levy payments
• Must submit Workplace skills plan (WSP) and annual training report (ATR) before 30 March of each year.

Read More

Project Coordination

DG Project Coordination provides support to employers and training providers that apply for the Services SETA Discretionary Grant Funding from application stage to project close-out. See Discretionary Grant

External Moderation

External moderation is the process of ensuring that assessments and internal moderations by Skills Development Providers are consistent, accurate and conducted according to the Skills Development providers’ assessment and moderation policies.

The purpose of external moderation is to ensure that Services SETA accredited providers assess and moderate learner results /achievements in a consistent; ethical; valid; flexible; Transparent; sufficient; reliable; and authentic by.

• verifying and validate that the assessment and internal moderation decisions made by Services SETA constituent assessors and moderators meet the required standards by checking the Skills Providers’ systems and procedures
• checking the credibility of the assessment and moderation processes
• checking the qualifications of the assessment and moderation practitioners
• sampling the learners PoEs and checking their validity, authentic, currency and sufficiency of evidence
• Checking the consistency of assessor and moderator decisions.

Should the Skills Development Provider meet the external moderation requirements the Learner achievements will be upheld and recommendation for certification of the competent learners is are made in an external moderation report.

The Services SETA external moderators must:

• be qualified and registered assessors and moderators
• proficient in assessment practices at the level of the level of subject matter of the assessment
• Have at least 3 years’ experience in moderation practices.

Certification

The certification of learners by the Services SETA is the final layer of quality control measures that are put in place to ensure that all the learning programs meet the standards as set out in the beginning of the process. The Services SETA is the only authority that prints the certificates on behalf of the TVET Colleges and Skills Development Providers (SDP). This is done once the Services SETA has verified all the results and audited them that the learners who underwent the training have indeed met all the requirements. The certificates are also printed by the Services SETA to ensure that they meet certain safety and security standards to avoid or counter criminal conduct.

This process also applies to applications that are received by the Services SETA for replacement certificates that had been lost and verification of existing certificates in cases where potential employers do background checks on candidates.

Learners can request certificate replacements or statement of results for their qualifications.