The returns to education in the city of Johannesburg

Abstract

A way to better understand the returns for investing in education is to identify the gap between education and employment. This issue has been identified not only in South Africa but worldwide. However, while it focuses on the challenges of employability there has been little research on the value of education in relation to employability and career development amongst workers’ productivity in public sector organisations. For this reason, a basic interpretative qualitative study is developed which explores this relationship with a focus on the value of the City of Johannesburg’s (COJ’s) subsidised education scheme in terms of its returns to organisational growth and human development. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic data analysis of employees’ perceptions, it is found that self-enrichment or personal development outweighs organisational benefits. A culture of life-long learning for the COJ employees has been created without the implementation of mentoring and succession planning to minimise mismatches in the workplace in order to enhance productivity.