The Empowerment Report Special Edition October 2019
“Educating and upskilling black employees is the strengthening focus of the B-BBEE Codes of Good Practice, and this is where this year’s top-ranked BBBEE companies continue to outperform their competitors. The Most Empowered Company on the JSE is construction group Wilson Bayly Holmes Ovcon (WBHO). It prides itself as a company in which education doesn’t stop at internal training and apprenticeships but extends into tertiary level education for deserving black learners and providing mentorship for its bursary students. WBHO also has 16 emerging black contractors, as well as some of its own employees, on its enterprise development programme. “Our success has been in crossamplifi cation of employment equity and training,” says Ingrid Campbell, director of WBHO Group Support Services. “For example, our young bursary students are mentored by an older WBHO bursary student to ensure that they succeed at varsity and when they start their working life together at the company. “We have also established amazing engineering schools with lectures held by senior operational staff , and through our trust, we offer tertiary education to our employees’ children. The results of these efforts are now becoming visible and we are all extremely proud to have become a transformed company,” she says. This speaks to the efforts of the construction sector as a whole in aligning itself to the B-BBEE Codes of Good Practice, having revised its charter at the end of 2017 to adhere to the then amendments to the codes.”
-By Helen Grange