CAPACITY BUILDING WORKSHOPS TO SUPPORT WSP-ATR SUBMISSIONS

In line with the Skills Development Act (SDA) and Skills Development Levies Act (SDLA), companies within the mining and minerals sector (MMS), are required to annually submit WSPATRs on 30 April. The purpose is two pronged, firstly to indicate measures in place to address skills shortages and gaps (workplace skills plan) in their organisational settings and secondly, to report on the training interventions implemented namely, the annual training report, to equip the workforce with the necessary competencies. Thus, it is important for companies to be provided with capacity to make successful submissions to access mandatory grants and by extension discretionary grants.

To minimise the turnaround time between submission, evaluation, approval, and grant payment processes, just before the submission starts, the Skills Development and Research Unit (SDRU) annually rolls out as part of meeting the annual targets, the capacity building workshops for the Skills Development Facilitators across the country. So far workshops have been rolled out in Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West and Free State provinces and were well attended by over 100 Skills Development Facilitators (SDFs) from across the different subsectors in the sector. Plans are ongoing to conduct the workshops in the remaining provinces. The main issues highlighted during the workshops are:

• Deadline for WSP-ATR submission is 30 April the annually;

• Deadline for extensions namely, in writing by 31 May;

• The funding model that governs the payment of the grants;

• Highlighting that companies which pay levies and submit the compliant WSP-ATR are eligible to access mandatory grants;

• Bank letter, signed document (the employee representative, CEO and CFO), and the SDF appointment letter are to accompany the submission;

• The WSP-ATR data that is required is converted into useful skills information, that the labour market intelligence requires to guide the MQA on what can be developed and implemented to meet the requisite skills demand in the sector.

The demonstration of the automated information system for WSP-ATR submission is conducted at these workshops, to provide capacity to the SDFs. This includes the registration process as well as every step of the submission process, on how to populate the WSP-ATR source template in order to submit. It was also highlighted that for the year 2023, deadline approval for the companies will not be granted, to allow for the closing of queries.