(Article #1 in the series “From Matric Myths to Meaningful Pipelines”)
Every January, South Africa’s matric results take over the news. Pass rates are celebrated, criticised and used, if only briefly, as a measure of whether the education system is moving in the right direction.
Not long after, the conversation shifts. Quietly at first, then more openly, attention turns to the labour market. If more learners are passing matric, the thinking goes, something should change on the employer side too. Entry level candidates should be better prepared. Hiring should get easier. Employment outcomes should improve.
Except that, for many employers, that is not what they see.
This is not because employers are careless or disengaged. In reality, many South African employers want to employ young people and are actively trying to create entry level opportunities.
The difficulty lies in how matric has come to be understood and used over time.
Through hiring norms, compliance expectations and habit, matric has quietly become the assumed entry point into work. It is treated as a baseline, a minimum standard, a safe filter. As a result, matric results are often interpreted as an indicator of workplace readiness, despite never having been designed for that purpose.
At its core, matric is an education outcome, a baseline academic milestone. Expecting it to function as more than that creates an illusion, and it is a mistake many organisations make without ever consciously choosing it.
A matric certificate marks an academic milestone, not a workplace competence benchmark.
In South Africa, the National Senior Certificate (NSC) is the school leaving qualification issued under the authority of the South African government. It confirms completion of Grade 12 and academic performance across a defined curriculum. What it does not reliably measure is practical capability, applied problem solving or readiness for structured work environments, particularly for young people entering the labour market for the first time.
What is often overlooked is that South Africa does not produce one uniform group of matriculants.
Each year’s results reflect at least four distinct outcomes:
- Bachelor’s pass, eligible for university degree study
- Diploma pass, eligible for diploma programmes
- Higher Certificate pass, eligible for certificate and vocational study
- NSC pass, which confirms completion of schooling but does not meet minimum requirements for higher education entry
These distinctions are clear in education policy and post school planning. They guide access to universities, colleges and training institutions. In hiring practice, however, and from nearly two decades working in skills development and recruitment, these differences are frequently flattened into a single requirement, “matric required”, treated as the minimum entry condition for employment.
Part of the challenge is that the minimum NSC pass threshold sits at 30 percent. That means the academic bar for achieving matric is relatively low, yet matric is still treated as a reliable entry point into the workplace.
At the same time, many young people never reach matric at all, with large numbers leaving school in Grade 10 or 11, often because of economic pressure, and are excluded from opportunity long before hiring decisions are even considered. In that context, the value of matric is often overstated, while the reality of youth exclusion is understated. With this background in mind the 88 percent pass rate, which was recorded in South Africa’s most recent exam cycle, tells employers far less than it appears to.
And yet, there seems to be an unwritten rule that matric equals entry into work, regardless of the level of the pass. The question is whether that assumption makes sense. Does having matric, at any level, automatically mean someone is ready for the workplace?
A candidate with a Higher Certificate pass and one with an NSC pass may both technically “have matric”, yet their academic preparation and progression pathways differ significantly. Treating these outcomes as equivalent creates unrealistic expectations for both employers and candidates.
The scale of this mismatch is often hidden behind headline figures like our latest 88 percent matric pass rate, the highest on record. While this reflects improvements in throughput, it does not translate directly into employability or capability.
Labour market research and SETA evaluations continue to highlight gaps in foundational numeracy, communication and applied workplace skills among school leavers. This is something I have seen consistently when assessing matriculants against basic literacy and numeracy benchmarks. The results are often far below what employers expect, not because young people lack potential, but because matric was never designed to certify workplace readiness, particularly when the minimum NSC pass threshold sits at 30 percent.
None of this is a failure of individual learners, or even of employers.
It is a limitation of what matric was designed to indicate, and a misunderstanding of how it has come to be used in employment decisions.
A clearer understanding of what matric represents, and of the different levels within it, allows employers to make more informed choices about the type of candidate they actually need in their environment. It shifts the conversation away from a simple “matric or not” question and towards a more practical one: what level of preparation is appropriate for this role, and what development will realistically be required after entry?
Perhaps the more useful question is not simply whether someone has matric, but what that matric actually represents.
Is a basic NSC pass, achieved at a 30 percent threshold, genuinely a better indicator of potential than a strong Grade 10 or Grade 11 result achieved at 60 /70 percent? Do we really understand the value we are attaching to these qualifications, or have we simply inherited assumptions about them over time?
And most importantly, how do those assumptions play out inside our workplaces?
When we treat matric as a fixed entry requirement rather than as one data point among many, we shape who gets access to opportunity, who is excluded before they begin and how much development we expect to happen after hire. If we misread the qualification, we mis-design the pathway.
The mistake is expecting education outcomes to translate neatly into employability.
Employers do not need to fix education to respond more intelligently. What they do need is a clearer understanding of what matric actually represents, and what it does not. Treated as one indicator among many, rather than a guarantee of readiness, it becomes far more useful when thinking about entry level roles and development pathways.
This shift will not solve South Africa’s employment crisis. But it does change something closer to home. It forces organisations to look more carefully at the assumptions built into their hiring decisions, their programmes and their expectations of young people.
