In this article we explore some of the common questions we get around the Skills Development Levy and interacting with your SETA.
Who can be my company’s Skills Development Facilitator and what do they do?
Your company’s skills development facilitator (SDF) can be either:
One of your employees;
An external person who you have formally contracted to take on this position; or
A person who you, together with a number of other employers, employ to assess the group’s skills development needs.
Your SDF will act as a liaison between your company and your Seta.
Your SDF must:
- Liaise with your Seta;
- Develop quality-assurance systems in your company;
- Develop, submit and implement your company’s workplace skills plan;
- Draft an implementation report against a workplace skills plan; and
- Tell you what your Seta’s quality assurance requirements are.
Can in-house training be considered a pivotal program?
Pivotal Programs are defined as professional, vocational, technical and academic learning programmes that result in qualifications or part qualifications registered on the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) that address critical and scarce skills needs. Internal programs would need to be registered in terms of NQF to be classified as pivotal and allow you to claim accordingly.
Must out-house training be accredited with an ETQA (Education and Training Quality Assurance Bodies) or is a certificate of completion enough?
Any course that is not accredited can be claimed for under the mandatory grant whereas training that is accredited with an ETQA can be claimed for under Pivotal and Discretionary grants.
How do unit standards work and how do we find out which unit standards are needed and likely to be granted discretionary funding?
A unit standard is:
A registered statement of desired education and training outcomes and its associated assessment criteria, together with administrative and other information as specified in the regulations.
Each unit standard has a credit value which is equivalent to 10 hours of notional learning. Notional learning time is:
- The learning time that it would take an average learner to meet the outcomes defined.
- It includes concepts such as contact time, time spent in structured learning in the workplace and individual learning.
Each unit standard has to be registered on the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) – at a particular level, with a prescribed number of credits.
In terms of finding out what discretionary funding you will be granted; the best thing to do is to find out what the scarce and critical skills are as listed by your Seta.
Can you claim back your SDL for training non-employees (eg. teaching matriculants basic computer skills)?
Yes, this would be listed under Non-Employees.
How can you increase your BBBEE score with SDL claims?
This is based on your percentage of spend on BLACK employees and non-employees training and provided the criteria are met, can be credited against various part of the your scorecard (including Skills and Socio Economic Development).