By Marosha Pather, Human Resources and Customer Experience Executive at Mettus
I started working at 20, and almost immediately decided I did not belong there. I was too young and too junior to be in a corporate environment, and I seriously considered leaving to study full time and coming back later, when I would be older and somehow more ready for it. What changed that was not a promotion or a plan. It was an external coach my employer brought in, an hour a week, for 2 years.
What that coach taught me was not strategy. It was how to conduct myself in front of senior executives. What to ask. How to answer. How to be professional in a room where nobody was going to stop and explain the rules to me. Roughly 100 hours over 2 years, and it did more for my career than any qualification I have earned since.
I now lead human resources and customer experience for a data and analytics group. I am fairly certain I would not be here if somebody had not spent those hours on a 20-year old who was ready to give up on the whole thing.
I think about that often, because the intervention was so small and the effect was so disproportionate. Somebody there decided a 20 year old was worth the investment at a point when nothing about me made that obvious, and that decision is the reason I am still in this profession.
I should be honest about something else, because it goes to the heart of the argument. I also had a father who understood business and who told me where to focus my growth. That is not nothing, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is also exactly the point. Most young people have no such voice at home, which means the only place they will ever hear it is at work, from us. What reached me twice over will reach them once, or not at all.
The door is the hardest part, and it is not the only part
South Africa’s conversation about young people is almost entirely about the door, and that is fair. Statistics South Africa put youth unemployment at 47.4% in the second quarter of 2026, with 5 million people aged 15 to 34 out of work. Of roughly 10.4 million young people aged 15 to 24, 36.4% are not in employment, education or training.
Ask any young person job hunting right now and they will tell you the same thing. Getting in is the hardest part. The competition is brutal, and no amount of preparation guarantees anything. But there is a second set of figures that we discuss far less. Among young South Africans who do have jobs, 24.6% sit in elementary occupations and only 4.7% are managers. So we fight to open the door, and then a great many people stand in the entrance for years.
That is the sentence I would say out loud in a room of HR directors. We are good at appointing young leaders. We are bad at backing them.
What backing actually looks like
Some years ago I employed a cleaner. Her name was Maureen, and over roughly seven years she was promoted step by step into a management role. Nothing on her original application predicted that. What was visible, very early and to anyone paying attention, was dedication, a willingness to learn, and an attitude that consistently went further than the job required. No CV can show that. Only proximity can.
This is the strongest argument I know for looking inside your own building before you advertise outside. The signals that actually predict whether someone will lead are behavioural. How they respond when something is not strictly their job. Whether they ask questions or protect themselves by staying quiet. How they take being corrected. None of it appears on paper, and all of it is visible to a manager who is watching.
Two views of the same person
Because I sit across both human resources and customer experience, I end up seeing people twice, and the two views rarely meet.
From the recruitment side, I can see the uncertainty and anxiety a candidate is carrying. I can see the questions they want to ask and do not ask, because they have decided that asking will cost them the job. From the experience side, I can see which employees are genuinely engaged and which have quietly disengaged, usually long before it shows up in a performance rating.
Those two views should be connected, and in most organisations they are not. We assess someone at the door on how well they perform in an interview. We assess them again 3 years later on their outputs. In between we have almost no structured sense of whether they are growing or drifting, which means we notice the drift only when the resignation arrives.
The conversation nobody wants to have
Young people frequently arrive at work without the unwritten rules. Not the technical skills, which we test for, but how to conduct themselves, how to handle disagreement, and what to do with their own emotions in a professional setting. That is not a character flaw. Nobody has taught them, and most workplaces expect them to absorb it by osmosis.
I once had to teach a young employee how to speak to senior executives, and specifically how to take the emotion out of it. Not to stay silent, but to separate the point from the feeling so that the point could actually land. It was an uncomfortable conversation for both of us. Their performance improved markedly afterwards.
I could have that conversation because a coach had it with me at 20. That is what mentorship is for. It transfers the unwritten rules to people who have no other route to them. It is not a standing coffee and a warm feeling. It is a regular hour with somebody whose job is to tell you the truth.
Programmes are the floor, not the ceiling
We run internships and YES placements, we have defined career paths, and we invest in training. Those structures matter, and I would defend every one of them. But a programme is the floor. Its real value is not the number of young people placed, it is what happens to them after the funding ends.
The honest measure of any youth initiative is not the intake number. It is how many of those people are still with you three years later, and what they are doing now. If the answer is a headcount and a line on a scorecard, that is compliance. Compliance is worth doing. It is simply not the same thing as development.
What I would say to a 23-year old
Do not give up. Take the risks. Hold yourself accountable. Make the mistakes and then learn from them. Above all, believe in yourself, particularly on the days when the room does not seem to.
But that advice only works if somebody on the other side is willing to back them. To see the potential the CV does not show. To have the difficult conversation instead of avoiding it. To give an hour a week to someone who has not earned it yet by any measure a spreadsheet would recognise.
I nearly walked away at 20 because I was convinced I was too junior to be in the room. Somebody decided otherwise, and gave me the hours to prove it. Every organisation in this country currently employs young people who are making exactly that calculation, quietly, at their desks. Whether they stay is largely up to us.
Marosha Pather is Human Resources and Customer Experience Executive at *Mettus*, a South African data, analytics and technology services group.
