As we all know from the old apprenticeship days, right from the start your salary was determined by your school grade. With only a standard 8 my starting salary (R80 per month) was way lower than a person with a matric.

Until you qualified, the matric appy always earned more than the fools with std 8, even though we sat in the same class learning the same stuff and at the end doing the same tests.

It it works like that in all types of employment, if you are a manager and dont have a degree, your salary will be a lot less. A manger with a degree could be earning as much as R50 000 more than the idiot doing the same job without the degree. Let the idiot go get the piece of paper (degree) the idiot (now the smart person) even though the position is exactly the same will double if not triple their salary the day the piece of paper is handed to HR.

Because of this, many parents who dont want their kids to battle like they did earning crap salaries have burnt the midnight oil to make sure their kids get a proper education (degree), has it improved their life, for some maybe, but in reality we now sit with hundreds of thousands people with degrees and no jobs for them.

We also sit with a world wide skills shortage, because nobody want to work 12 hours shift hard physical labour jobs busting their backside off for peanuts.

The right solution would be to improve the tradies salary, make it more attractive for youngsters to have to work in the crap conditions we are expected to work in.

You have some smart person who has never sweated a day at work, sitting in an air-conditioned office all day, writing a bunch of safety regulations for an industry he has never worked in, its a joke.