South Africa’s latest labour data raises an uncomfortable question: if even graduates are struggling to find work, is a qualification on its own still enough to build a career on?
According to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026, the official unemployment rate rose from 31.4% to 32.7%, and the economy shed 345,000 jobs in three months. The number of unemployed South Africans climbed to 8.1 million. Graduate unemployment rose to 12.2%, while the rate for people without matric sat at 37.6%, well above the national average, and a reminder that employability is now a challenge at every level of education.
For Michael Hanly, Managing Director of New Leaf Technologies, the figures confirm something many employers already feel: qualifications still matter, but they no longer carry a career on their own.
“The world of work is changing faster than most education systems can keep up with,” says Hanly. “A qualification has fast become the entry point of a career, not the finish line. Micro-credentials are surfacing a lot more value.”
Hanly’s view is shaped by New Leaf Technologies’ work with organisations including Bidvest Bank, City Lodge Hotels Group, Coca-Cola Beverages, Nissan, St John Ambulance and PNA, building workforce capability through digital learning, learning platforms and skills development. Earlier this year, New Leaf Technologies won the Best Learning Platform Implementation award at the Learning Technologies Awards in the UK and was also nominated for several other international industry awards, including the Learning and Performance Institute’s (LPI) External Learning Solution of the Year award.
One of the biggest misconceptions about education, Hanly says, is that learning stops when formal study ends.
“Does anyone really know at 20 exactly what they’ll be doing for the rest of their working life?” he asks. “Most people study one thing and end up building a career in something else entirely. Careers are rarely linear, and they increasingly depend on people who keep learning, reskilling and adapting.”
Technology is accelerating that shift. Many of today’s most in-demand roles barely existed a decade ago, and new ones keep appearing.
“A lot of jobs that exist today didn’t exist ten years ago, and we haven’t even imagined some of the jobs we’ll have ten years from now with AI encroaching on many entry-level opportunities,” says Hanly. “People have to stay open to learning throughout their whole career.”
AI adds another layer. Hanly is clear that it changes how people work without removing the need to actually understand the work.
“With AI, everyone suddenly has access to answers,” he says. “But if you don’t understand the underlying concepts or fundamentals, how do you know when the answer is wrong? How do you even ask the right question? AI should make us more efficient, not rescue us from having to understand.”
For Hanly, the harder question for most organisations is not whether to train people, but whether they can prove it made a difference.
“Too much learning still gets measured by who showed up and who finished the course,” he says. “That tells you nothing about whether anyone got better at their job, we can’t keep peering in the rear view mirror. The organisations getting this right measure learning against real performance outcomes, and they build it into how the business runs rather than treating it as a once-a-year event.”
Across sectors including financial services, hospitality, retail, manufacturing and healthcare, New Leaf Technologies has watched that thinking take hold, with more organisations moving away from learning as a single event and towards skills mapping and clear career pathways.
“People need to see where they’re heading and what skills will get them there,” he says. “When someone can see how learning connects to their next opportunity, they put far more into it.”
The cost of standing still is real.
“The world is moving too fast for organisations to keep doing what they’ve always done,” says Hanly. “Businesses need people who can adapt to new technology, new customer expectations and new ways of working. The ones that don’t develop their people get left behind.”
Looking ahead, he believes the most valuable capability won’t be any single skill, but the ability to keep picking up new ones.
“Over the next decade, adaptability, analytical thinking, creative problem-solving and emotional intelligence will matter more and more, alongside knowing how to work with new technology,” he says. “The people and the companies that do well will be the ones who treat learning as something you never finish.”
As South Africa works through rising unemployment and a fast-changing world of work, the latest labour data points to one conclusion: the ability to keep learning may be the most valuable qualification of all.