Levelling up: transforming access to high-potential careers

Coding is not the answer. Neither are Creativity, Strategy, or Storytelling. Human-centred design and Agile often fail.

But combine them in a continuously improving social learning model, and you can create access to careers, change narratives, and share growth.

We’re learning to do this and we need your help to scale.

Umuzi provides disadvantaged youth access to alternative tertiary education, and entry to high-value careers.

We’re continuously evolving to be more human-centred. 

Currently we are:

• high-impact: 80% of our recruits secure high-value jobs

• quick: 12 months to completion including work experience and a formal qualification

• free: fees paid by employers

• paid: employers also pay each recruit a monthly stipend

• practical: on-the-job training from real managers, not lecturers

• holistic: housing programme, peer mentoring, active alumni events and network, frequent content publishing

• demand-driven: continuously evolving to recruits’ and employers’ needs

• accredited: offering a national certificate to our graduates
  

The new economy has a massive need for teams with skills in four disciplines:

• Strategy / Project Management: Product Owners
  

• Creative: Digital Designers (UI/UX)

• Coding: Full Stack Developers

• Storytelling: Multimedia Content Producers

What differentiates our model?

• youth learn to independently acquire technical skills in one of the four disciplines

• they practice human-centred design on every project

• they work together, in cross-functional teams, on real projects, using Agile to continuously make, fail, learn and adapt

250 young people have already benefitted. Now we need your help to scale.

Why scale Umuzi? 

Global investment in tech is astronomical. How much is spent developing new hardware and software? Meanwhile we sit on 7+ billion human "processors", by far the most sophisticated hardware on the planet. But our software is outdated. Disadvantaged youth, especially in developing countries like ours, don't have access to the latest "systems updates" coming out of Silicon Valley: processes like human-centred design, Agile, and high-value skills like coding, strategic thinking and user-experience design.

Umuzi is a continuously iterating experiment to learn the most efficient ways to leapfrog disadvantaged youth into the workforce of the future. We've already got a decent solution. With your help, we can make it exceptional, and scale it to afford this opportunity to the world.

Education isn’t keeping up with change and disadvantaged youth bear the brunt. Too many young people don't realise their potential. They are either unemployed (shockingly 50%+ in our home country, South Africa) or underemployed (stuck behind cash registers or in call centres). Current education is too slow, expensive, uninspiring, siloed, and increasingly irrelevant for future careers.

The current narrative of poor education resulting in un- / under-employment, inequality, and social unrest, must change.

Young people need more innovative education solutions to gain access to high-potential careers. We’ve been working with disadvantaged youth in South Africa since 2009 to learn about this problem.

We view our organisation and alumni as a community, working together in a talent pipeline, to live our theory of change:

(i) Access - to innovative education, and high-potential careers, we empower disadvantaged youth to...

(ii) Change the Narrative - bringing their diverse, lived experience into the economy; designing new products, services, and solutions to social problems, resulting in...

(iii) Shared Growth - more equitable participation in the workforce as a “creative class”, and more agency as high-value creating citizens.

We aim to develop a robust, globally scalable solution that enables any disadvantaged young person to radically improve their life prospects, and get their first high-potential job, in just 12 months. 

We’ve already achieved this in Johannesburg with cohorts of 100 young people a year.

We’ve already built the following, which we need to leverage and adapt:

• a sophisticated online recruitment pipeline

• a human-centred design and project-based curriculum, managed on Agile principles

• industry partnerships to fund the programme, provide work experience to our recruits, and ultimately employ them when they graduate. 

1. Iterate our bespoke learner management system to enable it to manage multiple recruitment, training, and alumni campaigns, simultaneously, across geographies |

2. Codify culture, staff selection, training, and management for radical growth - Develop organisational capacity to scale

Basic metric: Cost per learner per year |

Currently: $8,000; Target: $4000, maintaining quality |Why? Further enhances accessibility & impact | Primary levers: 1. scale to spread overhead

2. online education tools to increase learner to manager ratio - Reduce cost of training

1. Develop business case and leverage existing industry relationships to secure funding |

2. Select country/city and site |

3. Hire and train team |

4. Leverage and adapt existing systems |

5. Learn to leverage management capacity across studios - Scale geographically

Umuzi's integrated management and design approach combines in-demand skills, with effective processes.

• Technically: recruits go deep in one of four disciplines
• Conceptually: recruits work collaboratively, in cross-functional teams, using human-centred design to solve real problems
• Professionally: we use Agile in a build-measure-learn feedback loop

We use consumer-facing software to:

• recruit and screen online: CV; portfolio; skill-set specific test; aptitude test
• facilitate self-driven learning in our short, formal qualification
• manage recruits’ journeys from applicant to alumnus

We’re beginning to use digital systems, leveraging our database to continuously learn from the performance of our applicants, recruits, alumni, and staff.

Umuzi started as a Photo Club in 2009, running workshops for disadvantaged youth in informal settlements. We'd never heard of human-centred design (HCD). Working weekly with young creatives in the townships taught us their needs: access to high-quality education and careers.

We formalised Umuzi and launched our first Academy in 2014 to address these needs. Working collaboratively with disadvantaged young people and South African employers, we've iterated our model, continuing to learn and increase impact.

Our philosophy is deeply rooted in HCD principles. We use it for everything we do from programme design, to how our recruits work on every project.

Candidates apply online, maximising accessibility.  

Umuzi's model is in-person, on-the-job training, 9-5pm, five days a week. Full-time, seasoned, industry professionals, act as managers and mentors. The closer our working environment matches that of future employers, the more likely our recruits are to succeed.

Our programme is free for recruits. They also get paid a monthly stipend. Participating employers fund it in exchange for the opportunity to employ the young people on completion.

We launched a housing programme in 2016 to reduce recruits’ transport costs and travel time. This allows us to accommodate candidates from other parts of the country.

Currently:

• 80% of Umuzi's funding comes from selling learnerships to employers. Learnerships are 12 month contracts between a young person, an employer, and a training provider (Umuzi). Our learnerships cost ±$8,000 pppa.

• 10% from foundation grants. The TK Foundation donated $230,000, over three years, starting in 2017.

• 10% from professional agency and production services; advertising agencies and brands hire our services, typically content creation e.g. shooting video for a social media campaign. We use our alumni to execute this, channeling value back into our community.

We plan to grow current revenue streams, and add:

• recruitment services: matching our alumni to ever more senior jobs, and taking a fee from the employer, like a recruitment firm.

• commercialise our technology: e.g. sell our recruitment system as a service to employers or educators.

• commercialise our methods: e.g. sell short-courses online.

Scaling, particularly outside South Africa.

Our current funding relies heavily on employers. South African legislation supports this with tax incentives. Other countries may not.

However, other funding models are available: taking a student loan would be affordable (our current costs are ±$8,000, including a ±$1,800 stipend). Even if recruits had to pay, our costs are significantly lower than traditional tertiary education. Scale and online education could help reduce our costs.

Maintaining our culture and values: our human-centred approach and identity as a community makes us unique. We need to guard this carefully as we grow.

https://www.facebook.com/umuziphotoclub/

https://www.instagram.com/umuziphotoclub/

http://umuzi.org/

Youth unemployment is rife in South Africa. There are few local programmes like our own, so our most urgent challenge is to scale locally. 

However, remaining focussed exclusively on South Africa disregards a few opportunities:

1. Learning from, and sharing our learning, with world-class programmes and practitioners in other regions
2. Learning to export our model to impact youth in other African and developing economies, and even disadvantaged youth in developed economies
3. Learning to attract global talent, funding, partnerships, and technology, to enhance our impact
4. Learning from MIT's experience in online education to reduce our costs and improve quality 

• Investec Bank: founding sponsor; they support 60 learnerships per year
• The Creative Circle: South African body representing the creative industry; link to employers
• TK Foundation: key donor

N/A. The need for radically better tertiary education is so acute "competition" isn't a worry.