For funders
You are already spending this money. Here it buys you an engineer.
Your skills development spend is not optional. What it produces is. This page is the commercial case, including the part your tax advisor would otherwise find for you.
One rand, three returns
Most skills spend buys one of these. This buys all three.
A compliance-only programme scores a card and produces nothing you can use. A recruitment spend produces a person and scores nothing. This is one line of budget that has to do both, and be defensible afterwards.
Skills development, learnerships and Section 12H
Recognised learnership spend, absorption points, and the graduate-band tax allowance.
First right of refusal on funded seats
A candidate you watched for a year, in a market short an estimated 60,000 professionals.
Outcomes you can put in front of a board
Every rate reported with the count it came from, defined the same way everywhere.
Return one · Compliance
The scorecard and the tax line, together.
Learnership spend counts as skills development expenditure on the B-BBEE scorecard, and learners who are absorbed at the end contribute on the absorption element as well. The programme is designed to produce absorption, which is where most skills spend fails to score.
On the tax side, Section 12H provides a learnership allowance in two parts: an annual allowance for each year of the agreement, and a completion allowance when the learner finishes.
Annual allowance under Section 12H, for a learner already holding an NQF 7 or 8 qualification.
Completion allowance under Section 12H, on the same band, when the learner completes.
Only the lead employer named in the learnership agreement can claim the Section 12H allowance. If your contracting position puts another entity in that role, the allowance goes with it — not with the money.
We would rather you heard that from us on this page than from your advisor three months into a structure that cannot claim. It is a solvable problem, and solving it is part of scoping the agreement.
These figures are the graduate band. Tax and B-BBEE outcomes are indicative and depend on your own circumstances and contracting position. Confirm both with your tax and verification advisors before committing budget.
Return two · Talent
First right of refusal, on people you have already watched work.
Recruiting an engineer in this market means competing for a scarce, mobile and expensive professional on the strength of a CV and two interviews. Funding a seat means watching a candidate for a year — through the proving phase, the floor and the consultancy rotation — and then deciding.
It is the same decision, made with a year of evidence instead of forty minutes of impression, and made before anyone else in the market is allowed to make it.
You fund a seat, or a block of seats
Seats are allocated on a first-committed basis from the 200 available for 2027. You can specify the profile you are recruiting toward.
First right attaches to the seat
Not to the cohort, and not to the programme. The right runs with the seats you fund, for the learners who occupy them.
You decide inside a defined window
The window is agreed up front so that neither the learner nor your hiring process is left open-ended. Its length is part of the agreement.
If you pass, the learner moves to the general pool
Placed with other partner employers, or continued into managed deployment with African Engineering Intelligence. Nobody is left standing because a funder changed direction.
Employment seats are commitments under agreement between the parties. They are not, and are not described as, guarantees of employment for any learner. [CLIENT: signed employment seat commitments — count, and whether contractually binding]
Return three · Legacy
Reportable, with the denominator attached.
Every rate on this site shows the count it came from. That is a rule we apply to ourselves, not a courtesy.
A percentage without its denominator is the standard currency of programme reporting, and it is the reason your board has learned to discount programme reporting. We would rather show you a small number honestly than a large one that will not survive a question.
Retention is defined once, on the results page, and used with that definition everywhere. Where a cohort has not been placed long enough to say anything, we say that instead of extrapolating.
This is also the part that survives a change of transformation manager. Numbers with their denominators still mean something to whoever inherits the file.
2027 seat allocation
200 seats. First committed, first allocated.
The cohort is capped by the filter, not by capacity. Roughly one in ten of the people who clear the proving phase are engineering graduates, and widening the filter to reach a bigger number would destroy the thing a funder is paying for.
Next intake: 2028. A commitment for 2027 has to be in place before the intake and proving phase runs, because the profile you are recruiting toward shapes who we look for.
Scoping a block takes one conversation. We will bring the funnel with our actual counts in it, the retention table with its denominators, and the contracting question above resolved against your structure.
The bridge