South Africa reportedly has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world. Graduate unemployment parallels the country's overall unemployment rate, with the youth being the most vulnerable group. Hence, work experience programmes are offered to prepare fresh graduates for the labour market. The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of graduates in a work experience programme. This paper adopted a qualitative approach to elicit the experiences of graduates regarding the graduate work experience programme. A total of 30 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with graduates sampled from the eThekwini municipality's work experience programme. The results indicate that while graduates participate in a work experience programme to gain skills and work experience needed to secure jobs and for professional registration purposes, they experience numerous challenges in the programme. These challenges include ill-treatment from senior staff members, lack of work resources, and unreasonable workload. It was also evident that graduates were unsatisfied about the work experience programme owing to the poor or lack of mentorship and the irrelevancy of the programme itself. This paper offers important evidence which suggests the need to develop work experience programme policy and monitoring and evaluation systems in order to improve the experiences of graduates in the programme. © 2022 Zethembe Mseleku.
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