6 October 2026
Qualified artisans across South Africa have been waiting years for Red Seal certificates from the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations. Photos: Ihsaan Haffejee
When Lebogang Molale passed his electrician’s trade exam in 2020, he was told he would receive his Red Seal certificate within three months. More than six years later, he is still waiting. Without the certificate, he battled to get permanent employment.
Molale is one of thousands of artisans in the country, who despite passing their exams, are waiting years for their Red Seal certificates. Without the cerifticate, they face lower salaries, fewer formal employment options and roadblocks to professional development. The certificate entitles them to salary increases, makes them eligible for career advancement, and allows them to access work overseas.
“I don’t know what’s happening. I’m getting frustrated because I can’t go anywhere,” Molale said. “Job opportunities are passing by.”
Red Seal certificates are issued by the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations (QCTO) under the oversight of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). The certificate is a national qualification for artisans including electrical work, welding, plumbing and diesel mechanics.
More than 100 QCTO-accredited test centres administer the exam. Training academies prepare students for the competency exam. Some training academies are accredited as test centres, while others send their students to a different facility to do the test.
But after years of delays, these facilities have built up backlogs of hundreds, sometimes thousands of outstanding certificates.
Olifantsfontein Artisan Academy, which has centres in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng, has over 700 students still waiting for their certificates. General manager Denise Stassen said some students have been waiting since 2019.
There are around 200 outstanding certificates at Qualitas in Johannesburg, 400 at Sol-Tech in Pretoria, and more than 1,600 at the UXI Artisan Development Group’s various campuses.
“Most employers do not want to employ them, or don’t recognise their qualification without the final certificate,” said Sol-Tech managing director Paul van Deventer.
The union Solidarity contacted 149 trade test centres and believes the collective number of students waiting for their certificates across the country is “enormous”.
The trade union Solidarity has been representing its members facing these delays. Solidarity Trades’ Network coordinator Stef Pretorius said he spoke with seven training academies and trade test centres, which reported a combined backlog of 6,000 certificates.
Pretorius has now contacted 149 trade test centres. Pretorius believes the collective number of students waiting for their certificates across the country must be “enormous”.
Minister of Higher Education and Training Buti Manamela said in September that the country will not be able to industrialise, modernise or compete globally without a strong corps of qualified artisans.
Data from the second quarter of 2026 shows that the youth unemployment rate has reached 47%. President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly described youth unemployment as South Africa’s most pressing challenge.
Dylan Elliott, 27, from Cape Town worked at electrical, solar and refrigeration companies before applying for his Red Seal. Before passing the test in October 2024, Elliott did a multi-week preparation course at Olifantsfontein Artisan Academy’s branch in Gqeberha. He estimated that he spent between R30,000 and R40,000 on accommodation, food, petrol and course fees.
Elliott said he has previously been offered work but couldn’t secure a position because he could not present his certificate. He was able to get a job in the United States but he is unsure how he will make a living when he returns to South Africa next year.
Keagan Ross, a trained welder, has been waiting for his Red Seal certificate for nearly two years. His pay was supposed to increase when he got a new position in June, but he has been stuck at the same salary level because he does not have his certificate.
“They wanted to also promote me as a supervisor, but they can’t because of the certificate,” Ross said.
Elsie Harmse, CEO of UXI Artisan Development, oversees a network of training academies across the country. She said the Red Seal certificate often allows artisans to receive three times the entry salary. Without a Red Seal certificate, she said, most artisans make between R4,500 and R8,000 a month.
Red Seal certificates are issued by QCTO but several other government entities are involved in the process.
Once a student passes their trade test, they receive a competency slip. The assessment centre sends the student’s results and additional documents to the Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) relevant to their specific trade. There are 21 SETAs.
Once the relevant SETA has reviewed and verified the documents, it sends the application to the National Artisan Moderation Body (NAMB). NAMB then sends the documents to QCTO, which prints the official certificate.
Sol-Tech’s van Deventer believes there’s a breakdown somewhere in that system. He said the process has had delays in the past.
Changes came to the Red Seal certification process in July 2024, when the previous standards were officially phased out for new learners.
Under the new system, the certification process is completely managed by QCTO. This includes overseeing the accreditation, implementation, and certification of all occupational qualifications, which were previously managed by the SETAs.
The change was meant to streamline the vocational training process into one unified system. But UXI Artisan Development’s Harmse believes the new process actually led to a bottleneck at QCTO, leading the council to hand back some responsibility to the SETAs.
“So what that actually meant in practice is that there’s a middleman, and that middleman brought us back to 21 different quality standards,” Harmse said. “The whole thing that QCTO was actually supposed to sort out.”
Saalim Adamgee, director and founder of Qualitas, said the SETAs he works with don’t reliably respond to emails when he enquires about certificate delays. They also don’t notify him if there are mistakes on an application that Qualitas submitted.
“For example, we found now that if the ID copy is not clear enough, they would not immediately notify us to fix it,” Adamgee said.
Adamgee said he now visits SETAs in person to ask about the delays. He said they are often understaffed. On one such visit, he said he encountered only one employee. (He would not disclose which office.)
Harmse said she’s begun flying her staff members to Johannesburg to sort through boxes of documents at different SETA offices. She said her employees take hard copies of all the evidence they have related to each outstanding certificate but to no avail.
Van Deventer said he also tried to intervene. In April of last year, Sol-Tech began driving documents directly to NAMB in an attempt to speed up the certification process.
“There’s not one system that traces those documents,” van Deventer said. “It’s almost impossible to say at any time where the certificate is.”
Beyond following up with the SETAs and resubmitting documents, training academies and test centres have little else they can do to support students amid delays.
Adamgee said he previously encouraged Qualitas students to call the SETAs to enquire about the status of their certificates, but the SETAs told him to stop.
At Olifantsfontein Artisan Academy, Stassen said she creates verification letters for students to show companies, confirming that they have indeed passed their trade test as an alternative to the certificate.
But Stassen said, “When the companies decide, ‘Listen, you don’t have your actual Red Seal’, there isn’t much that we can do.”
In June, Solidarity brought an urgent application in the Labour Court in an attempt to force the state to intervene in the Red Seal certificate delays. Van Deventer said Solidarity brought the case after 87 Sol-Tech students who are members approached the union for help.
The documents were served on 21 respondents, including the Minister of Higher Education and Training, QCTO and various relevant SETAs.
On 17 July, the Labour Court ordered that QCTO issue the Red Seal certificates for the 87 artisans named in the case. All of the certificates have since been granted.
The respondents were also ordered to meet with Solidarity to discuss systemic shortcomings in the certification process and potential solutions before 30 September.
Pretorius said the meeting took place on 15 September. Although he described the discussion as productive, Pretorius said some SETAs did not attend the meeting.
“They’re basically in contempt of court,” Pretorius said. “They just don’t care. They don’t read emails. The communication just goes into a black hole, and nobody reads it. Nobody responds. That’s how dysfunctional these things are.”
GroundUp contacted the eight SETAs named in the Labour Court order. Only AgriSETA and the FoodBev Manufacturing SETA, which declined to comment, responded.
AgriSETA CEO Fanny Phetla blamed delays on incomplete or incorrect information being submitted and reports not being submitted on time.
QCTO, NAMB and the DHET also did not respond to GroundUp’s requests for comment before the time of publication.
Following their roundtable discussion, Pretorius said QCTO has until 28 October to file a turnaround plan detailing how it will address the certificate delays.