On 14 March 2026 Sheen joined a Growth for Jobs drone future workshop and tech career awareness day at Du Rust Futura Academy, streamed live from the school hall.

What Growth for Jobs is

Growth for Jobs (G4J) is the Western Cape Government's economic growth strategy: a stated ambition of a trillion-rand provincial economy growing at 4–6% a year in real terms by 2035, with the potential to create more than 600,000 jobs. Skills development runs through it, with technology, agriculture and business-process sectors identified as gateways for young people entering the workforce.

Drone training sits inside that strategy specifically — a WCED-facilitated initiative introducing learners to drone piloting as a career pathway rather than a hobby.

Why drones are a good career conversation

Drones do something in a school hall that few technologies manage: they are immediately impressive and immediately practical. A learner watching one fly does not need to be persuaded it is interesting. And unlike a lot of what gets shown at career days, the jobs are real, local and reachable.

In the Western Cape alone, commercial drone work runs through agriculture (crop surveys, spraying, yield monitoring), surveying and construction, infrastructure inspection, conservation and film. The route in is a Remote Pilot Licence, not a four-year degree — which makes it one of the few technology careers a learner can picture themselves reaching from where they are sitting.

Our part of the day

We ran the hands-on and career-awareness side alongside the drone programme — the flight gates and course markers on the hall floor, the robotics and coding that sits underneath any autonomous system, and the conversation about what a technology career in this province actually looks like.

That last part is where we try to be careful. Career days often oversell: everyone will work in AI, everyone should learn to code. Learners can tell when they are being sold something. The more useful message is narrower and true — these are the sectors hiring here, this is the entry qualification, this is what the work is actually like day to day, and here is the thing in your hands right now that connects to it.

Grade 9 again

As with the Ceres bootcamp, the leverage is in reaching learners before subject choices close things off. A drone in a school hall is a good hook. What matters is the sentence afterwards: to do this, you keep mathematics.

Youth employment in the Western Cape grew by 13.3% over a period in which it declined nationally. The opportunities exist. The gap is between them and the learners who never hear that they are eligible.

We run career awareness sessions, drone and robotics workshops for schools and districts — talk to us, or see our workshop programmes.