Powering Tomorrow, Skilling Today
The Mining Qualifications Authority will be hosting the third Research Colloquium during the month of October 2026.
This year’s Research Colloquium will be anchored by the flagship study, “Future-Ready Skills for the Critical Minerals Value Chain in South Africa”, undertaken in partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
The study maps the skills South Africa needs at every stage of the critical minerals value chain, from exploration and mining through processing, advanced manufacturing and export, and shows how building that skills pipeline can turn the country’s critical minerals endowment into jobs, investment and a just energy transition.
Its central finding is an “activation gap”: government, industry, labour, academia and communities are broadly aligned on priorities but are not yet coordinated in acting on them.
The Colloquium responds by convening these voices in a single Quadruple Helix panel to move the sector from thinking the same to thinking together, under this year’s theme, “Powering Tomorrow, Skilling Today”.
The Research Colloquium will be hosted as follows:
- Date : Thursday, 01 October 2026
- Time : 09H00 – 14H00
- Venue : To Be Confirmed (in Gauteng)