Creating the WorkFit Brand

The WorkFit Campaign is a non-profit initiative that supports TVET colleges and other organisations in boosting youth employability. Supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, WorkFit is the last project of the Digital Jobs Africa initiative which aimed to catalyse new, sustainable employment opportunities and skills training for African youth.

The mission of the WorkFit Campaign is to create awareness about the tools and templates that are freely available for organisations to help improve youth’s work readiness with the ultimate goal of increasing high-potential disadvantaged youth employment. 

Localising the DDT Project

The WorkFit Campaign was originally referred to as the Demand Driven Training Toolkit (DDTT). The term Demand Driven Training (DDT) was not well recognised within South Africa and received negative feedback from local stakeholders. For this reason, the team made the decision to rename and rebrand the DDTT to allow for the localisation and adoption of the DDTT.

When brainstorming for a new name, two main themes were identified. Firstly, the name should be short and easy to remember and secondly, the name should portray the mission and values of the project. During a workshop tea break, the team congregated outside in the summer sun and team member Liz Moore encouraged a stretching session to boost everyone’s oxygen levels before heading back into the next creative session. 

And that’s when it hit us: fitness is the perfect analogy for work readiness in that it moves people away from an over- emphasis on the intellectual mode of learning (fostered by our education system), and makes them aware of the experiential and behavioural elements of being work ready. Fitness is also a domain rich with imagery that youth aspire to, has a strong emphasis on team-work, and taps into the fitness craze our society is currently experiencing.

There it was: WorkFit was born! Combining the concepts of fitness and work-readiness into one – a brand that would serve to promote a Toolkit geared towards helping organisations improve their employability programmes and get their youth fit for the working world. In addition, sport has always acted as a unifying factor for South Africans and helps bypass language and cultural barriers.

The WorkFit Brand Identity

The WorkFit Brand Identity is composed of a bright and vibrant colour palette as well as clearly-defined imagery that merges the concepts of work-ready youth in sports settings.

The colours in the palette were chosen for two reasons: in the first instance, these are the colours of the South African flag, an element that the team wanted to incorporate given that one of our main tasks is to localise the toolkit for adoption in South Africa. In the second instance, the six primary colours chosen are also the colours of the Olympics. This is quite a significant point to consider as the link between the Olympics and the WorkFit Campaign sports-imagery is very apt. In other words, just like the top athletes attend the Olympics, the WorkFit Campaign has been working with willing TVETs and Universities to ensure that they adopt the WorkFit Toolkit to become the top post school campuses.

From this, The WorkFit Campaign was born, serving as the South African version of the DDT Project, with the Demand Driven Training Toolkit being localised as the WorkFit Toolkit.