NWU Team Builds New Training Course to Tackle Youth Unemployment

A Course Built for Impact

Youth unemployment remains one of South Africa's most urgent socio-economic challenges, and equipping the people who work directly with young people — career counsellors and Life Orientation teachers — is a critical lever for change. The Qhubekela Phambili Trainer Development short course was created to do exactly that: give practitioners a structured, evidence-based way to deliver the Qhubekela Phambili Career Enhancement Programme as it was designed to work, so that its benefits reach learners consistently and reliably.

The course is a hybrid, 40-hour programme, combining structured protocols with practical, hands-on training. It is protocol-driven by design, ensuring that no matter who delivers it or where, participants receive the same high standard of training grounded in research rather than guesswork.

Two Contributions, One Shared Goal

The course's foundation was laid by Dr Rachele Paver, whose work on the content and methodology shaped the programme into the evidence-based, protocol-driven curriculum it is today. Building on that foundation, Dr Lance Bunt, from NWU's Computer Sciences department, is now developing the technical infrastructure and visual identity that will bring the course to life for trainers across the country — from the systems that support delivery to the look and feel that represents it.

Together, their work reflects a broader ambition at Optentia: to move research beyond the page and into practice, creating tools that are not only academically robust but genuinely usable at scale.

Why It Matters

For career counsellors and Life Orientation teachers, the course offers more than new content — it offers a reliable, research-backed method for helping young people build the skills they need to find and keep meaningful work. By training the trainers with fidelity in mind, Optentia and its partners are aiming for a multiplier effect: better-equipped practitioners reaching more young people, more consistently, with an intervention proven to work.

As the Qhubekela Phambili Trainer Development course moves from development into rollout, it stands as a clear example of how collaborative, cross-disciplinary research — spanning psychology, education and computer science — can translate into scalable, real-world solutions for South Africa's youth.