Despite significant inroads into addressing SA's skills shortage, the problem remains massive, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said on Wednesday.

Briefing the media on the 2007 report of the joint initiative on priority skills acquisition (Jipsa), she said vacancies in the public sector were still unacceptably high.

Further, public schools and university throughputs were still too low, the quality and availability of trainers was a major constraint, and rural communities had inadequate access to education and skills opportunities.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said the global situation had changed since Jipsa's launch two years ago and the initiative had to be "upscaled".

Urgent attention also had to be given to foreign skills recruitment, because the country did not have the luxury of time for all the necessary training.

Increase the number of artisans

However, significant inroads had been made into increasing the number of artisans in training and current training levels were higher than originally expected.

According to the report, the 2007/08 service levels agreements (SLAs) signed between the various sector education and training authorities (Setas) and the labour department reflected a total of 18 879 artisans to be registered.

Provisional Seta SLAs indicated an additional 20 000 would be registered for 2008/09.

The national skills fund allocated a further R300-million for training 7350 more artisans.

And, among other things, the safety and security sector had also started a pilot project to determine the capacity of defence, police, and correctional services to train and assess artisans.

Regarding engineers, the report said the education department's enrolment planning forecast that total engineering graduations would rise by 500 a year to about 2000 a year by 2010.

Sapa