Sandton

What would happen to sales in your company if your B-BBEE score  drops by two to four levels? The competition would make inroads into your market!

Stefan Lauber facilitating the B-BBEE Workshop

One of the easiest way to  boost your rating is through skills development. In essence the new codes demand a far greater investment in skills development with a particular emphasis on accredited training and learnerships.

• Proactively develop the skills necessary to excel in business
• Invest in their people to retain them longer
• Create ladders of learning that create career paths
• Use learnership as an alternative way to attract new recruits
• Implement these programmes cost effectively by taking advantage of all the available incentives.

• Only the Socio-Economic Development element has stayed the same with 5 points. All other elements have become more difficult.
• Management Control contributes now 15 points instead of 10 points.
• Ownership has gained in importance; it now counts for 25 instead of 20 points. Unlike in the past, even small business will be assessed in terms of ownership. To understand this element better download the presentation from a previous Community of Experts event on the new B-BBEE codes.
• Preferential Procurement and Supplier Development have merged. They now account together for 40 points instead of the previous 35. In other words, it will have a major influence on who companies will decide to work with.
• Skills Development earns 20 points instead of 15 points, an extra 5 bonus points are available.

Hanli Malan facilitating at the B-BBEE Workshop

Priority elements

Of these five elements, ownership, preferential procurement and skills development are considered priority elements. That means that if you do not score at least 40% of the minimum target of these priority elements, you will be marked down by one level on your overall score. For example, you will have to score at least 8 out of the 20 points available for skills development or you will be penalised.

• You can earn 8 points if you invest 6% of your payroll on the training of black people. It used to be 3%.
• Another 4 points can be received if you spend 0.3% of your total payroll on learning programmes for disabled, black employees.
• By participating in learnerships, apprenticeships and internships you can claim 4 points if 2.5% of your staff is enrolled on such programmes and another 4 points if 2.5% of your company’s headcount are black unemployed learners.
• You earn an additional 5 bonus points if all your unemployed learners will be gainfully employed at the end of the learnership.

New benefits under the latest codes

Apart from the changes in the way points are allocated under the new codes you should also be aware that:

• You can now also claim for training costs of people that are not employed by your company.
• Learnerships, apprenticeships and internships are a great way to boost your training spend, as you can count the salaries of the learners as a training expenditure.
• Learnerships for the disabled allow you to score in all the three areas at the same time.
• Skills development spending can be counted in two elements at the same time, i.e. it can be both part of supplier and enterprise development.
• The cost for your Skills Development Facilitator can be claimed as a training expense.
• Only 15% of your training spend can consist of internal training that is not accredited. In other words most of your training will have to be unit standard aligned.
• Only 15% of your training claim can be for expenses such as travelling, catering or venue hire.
• SETA grants such as the mandatory, pivotal and discretionary grants can help you to fund your training programmes.
• SARS offers a tax break of R 60 000.00 per participants on a learnership, which equals a saving of R 16 800.00 per learner per year. For more information, read up on the presentation from a previous Community of Experts event on SARS Tax Breaks.
• SARS also allows you to deduct R 1 000.00 per young person per month that you employ, which equals an annual saving of R 12 000.00. Terms and conditions apply.
• You can also benefit from substantial salary savings as previously unemployed learners only need to be paid an allowance instead of the normal salary. Depending on the position under consideration, you can save up to R 2,000 per month per person on a learnership.
• All of the above amounts a rough saving of approximately R50 000 per participant on a learnership.

As you can see from the above points, there are plenty of incentives available for you to boost your skills development score even if your training budget is limited.

Choose an experienced partner

“Choosing an experienced partner in implementing such programmes is essential to make such programmes a success”, Stefan Lauber says.  As one of the first training companies to implement learnerships, i-Fundi has built a wealth of best practises on how to best implement accredited training programmes.

 

It provides an end-to-end solution that allows companies to focus on their core business safe in the knowledge that they work with a company that helps it to deliver the expected results with the least amount of trouble.

Conclusion

“Most companies realise that they have to implement accredited courses and learnerships. Invariably I am asked, how to go about starting these programmes” said Hanli Malan from Business Evolved Verification.

The new codes place a much greater emphasis on accredited training in general, and learnerships in particular.

Click on this link to get a handy checklist of the documentation that your verifier will need.