From classroom to career: AI has the potential to bridge South Africa’s skills gap
By Shaun Fuchs
The matric class of 2024 has achieved an impressive 87.3% pass rate—one of the highest in recent history.
This milestone means more students than ever before will be entering the working world.
However, while youth unemployment saw a slight decline towards the end of last year, the gains were mostly concentrated in largely unskilled sectors such as construction and trade.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of formal sector positions remain unfilled, highlighting a disconnect between available skills and market demands.
The South African education system is clearly struggling to produce matriculants equipped to secure meaningful employment, establish entrepreneurial ventures, or drive sustainable economic growth.
I believe that, because the traditional system has remained unchanged for far too long, the majority of matriculants lack the essential skills needed to thrive in today’s technology-led world.
As technological advancements continue to impact every facet of our lives, education must keep pace. Integrating AI tools into the classroom is imperative as it has the ability to define the future of learning, the workforce, and the economy.
These tools also have the capability to help students with complex topics by providing explanations and examples, guiding them through problem-solving processes, and offering feedback on assignments.
Here are five essential areas where educators can harness the power of AI to support future-ready students in 2025:
Personalised learning: Having platforms that track each student’s progress, identify areas for improvement, and tailor learning plans accordingly ensures that every student can thrive at their own pace with targeted support from staff.
Social-emotional learning (SEL): SEL focuses on emotional intelligence, resilience and interpersonal skills, with the goal of ensuring that students are not only academically prepared, but also emotionally and socially equipped, for future challenges. We use AI-powered SEL tools to monitor students’ behaviour so that we are able to intervene timeously if necessary.
Sustainability and the environment: Environmental and social projects that foster stewardship, responsible planning, and effective management of resources have become key as global concerns about sustainability ramp up. Our students work their way through simulations that expose them to real-world issues and challenge them to develop innovative, applicable solutions.
Hybrid learning: Real-time feedback systems and personalised learning pathways make hybrid learning accessible to all students. This helps to prepare students for the hybrid working world that arose during the pandemic and is going to be the way of the future. At the same time, potential drawbacks of hybrid and remote work, like isolation, can be effectively managed.
STEAM: By employing AI and other emerging technologies to make STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and maths) subjects – all of which are key but scarce skills in the real world – more accessible. Students can engage in hands-on learning in fields like coding, analytics, robotics, machine learning and AI ethics, which combine to teach critical thinking and creative problem-solving.
At Centennial Schools we teach that continuous learning has become a critical element of employability. Going forward, our students will most likely not just have one job; instead, they will be expected to fill several roles at the same time, all of which are constantly evolving. AI is poised to fill the need for ongoing, convenient upskilling and even reskilling, making a deep understanding of its potential and responsible usage even more critical.
While current consensus is that AI will unlikely replace high-quality, human-led teaching, the technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that this opinion may change sooner than we think. In the meantime, there are an ever-growing number of sound reasons for incorporating AI-led aids into educators’ toolboxes.
Shaun Fuchs, Founder of Centennial Schools Sandton.
BUSINESS REPORT