Enhancing young work seekers’ employability and access to the labour market

Youth unemployment has left over half of young people in South Africa without work. Apart from structural factors such as a lack of labour-intensive economic growth, disenfranchised and talented young people are “locked” out of the labour market as a result of information and income poverty.

Access to skills training is out of reach for most, and research has found that work-seeking in itself can cause poverty.

Existing programmes to address the youth unemployment problem in South Africa are expensive and difficult to scale, underscoring the need for a radically different approach - rethinking how talent is sourced, measured, matched, and supported.

The Reach Trust believes that there is a significant opportunity to disrupt the status quo and unlock substantial value and savings for young work-seekers through a cost-effective and scalable mobile technology solution.

MoveUp is a free mobile app and mobi site that affordably helps young people to learn new skills and build a performance-based CV.  

• Micro courses allow users to learn entry-level jobs skills and build successful behaviours through small focussed steps.

• MoveUp’s built-in CV generator automatically captures everything that a user learns and achieves on the platform on their “SmartCV”. They can easily share their SmartCV online, or download and print it

MoveUp was trialled as a minimum viable product (MVP) in 2018 and following encouraging early results, funding was secured from Nedbank to formally expand the product offering.

The first full version of MoveUp was launched in 2019 and has experienced phenomenal growth, reaching 100 000 users in less than 6 months. A little over 2 years later and we have now registered user number 900 000, and are on target to break through the 1 million mark by the end of 2022.

During this time we have created more than 675 000 free Smart CV, while more than 300 000 courses have been completed.