Unlocking industry potential through
LEVERAGING DATA INTELLIGENCE
FOR INFORMED DECISION-MAKING
Skills development and unemployment are deeply interconnected. A major cause of unemployment in South Africa is the mismatch between employer needs and individuals’ skill sets: their technical competencies often fall short of employer expectations. While education gives a foundation, skills development is essential to bridge this gap and effectively address unemployment, provided the identified missing links between skills development and joblessness are resolved. To identify them, it is essential to have access to proper guidance on the types of skills in demand at any given time.
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While intuition may initially guide us towards defining in-demand skills, data is key to validating, understanding and quantifying the demand. This assists learners (at secondary and tertiary level) and job seekers, as well as people who may already be employed and wishing (or needing) to upskill, to navigate the job market successfully.
Introducing JobTrendZA! JobTrendZA is a wide-ranging tool designed to redefine stakeholders’ understanding of in-demand skills in South Africa. JobTrendZA consolidates and standardises information on job opportunities from leading job search platforms used by South African businesses. This ensures that our product offers comprehensive insights into job trends and their associated skill requirements over time.
The JobTrendZA PowerBI report on the right provides a summary overview of job trends as extracted from JobTrendZA, allowing you to explore job opportunities by location, industry, occupation, and various employment parameters, including employment type and level. View the report to discover how JobTrendZA empowers decision-making with via the depth and precision of its analysis.
The JobTrendZA report now includes the May 2026 job opportunity results.
While May 2026 continues to reflect lower job opportunity levels than those recorded in 2024 and 2025, the month marks a welcome improvement over April 2026. Although it is too early to conclude that a sustained recovery is underway, the result provides an encouraging indication that the downward trend observed since the start of the year may be beginning to stabilise.
When comparing April 2026 with May 2026, the most noticeable employment category trends are:
- Permanent job opportunities showed a considerable increase of 5.26%, and temporary job opportunities showed a small increase of 0.39%.
- Remote job opportunities showed an increase of 2.32%, and onsite job opportunities showed an increase of 1.89%.
- Intermediate job opportunities showed a sizeable increase of 4.22%, and management/specialist job opportunities showed a slight increase of 0.81%.
For the month of May, the location of most (72.21%) job opportunities remained in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Well over half (62.30%) of the job opportunities also remained in the following industries: Professional, scientific and technical activities; Information and communication; and Financial and insurance activities. Regarding occupation groups, slightly less than half (46.88%) continued to be in the following: Management; Computer and Mathematical; and Business and Financial Operations.
These results can be explored in depth on the interactive JobTrendZA report here.
The results discussed above can be found on the Growth and Loss tab, the Geographical, Industry and Company Categories tab and the Opportunities and Categories tab, all of them with the Month filter set to 2026 – May. (Note the feature at the top left of each tab, where you can save yourself some effort by selecting the year before you set the month filter.)
JobTrendZA is the public-facing interface for our custom-built system, designed to provide both Kululeko and our clients with detailed and authentic data to inform decision-making processes. The underlying data for JobTrendZA is obtained from publicly available sources. It is harvested daily, then compiled and prepared monthly.
To ensure consistency and comparability, the data is standardised, according to internationally recognised standards, wherever possible.
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For instance, industries are mapped to the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, and job opportunities are aligned with Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes. Where established standards are unavailable, our in-house data engineering team develops and applies proprietary code lists for standardisation.
Given the volume of the data and its diversity (it is mostly captured at source by users), our team uses multiple machine learning algorithms to standardise and categorise the data effectively.
While JobTrendZA primarily showcases the power of high-level data categorisation, our system also incorporates lower levels of SIC and SOC codes, along with detailed descriptions of job opportunities. These descriptions give valuable insights into the skills, qualifications, experience and tasks required for different occupations. They include location-specific nuances.
As our efforts are ongoing, we anticipate that we will accurately track shifts in skills, qualifications, experience and tasks for occupations across various locations. By analysing these changes over time, we aim to forecast future trends and requirements in the job market.
We appreciate Rayobyte’s partnership in providing ethical proxies
Kululeko has committed to ethical data gathering by deciding to utilise Rayobyte proxies. Rayobyte’s strict guidelines from sourcing to usage ensure that we are able to meet the highest ethical standards while fostering positive change in employment opportunities.
