Pensioner buys old petrol station to start upskilling rural youth

Mike Young travelled to all corners of the earth, but found what he was truly looking for in his back garden -- a chance to pioneer market-led skills development.  

A chance conversation about a gate in the small coastal town of Witsand unlocked a dream that is changing lives in the Western Cape.  

Retired maritime conceptual engineer Mike Young got chatting to his next-door neighbour who was busy with a home building project. To their surprise they discovered they had something in common other than their property boundary: a desire to set up a skills development programme for rural youth stuck in the middle of nowhere.  

And that’s exactly what they’ve done, in a repurposed old Caltex garage that Young and his wife Lynne bought in the Overberg town of Heidelberg.  The Youngs bought the infrastructure; their neighbour, Heinrich Bower, a former apprentice program developer and educator from Botswana, designed the programmes.  

“He was the right guy at the right time,” Young says of the chance meeting. “I’m a great believer that if things happen naturally, they are the right thing, and this just sort of happened.”  

Heidelberg is now home to the Go Maritime NPC, a multi-faceted, small town youth development programme with a specific focus on technical training, mentorship, accreditation and employment creation for the maritime and other industries.  

Young is an enthusiastic believer in the ‘Root Stock’ model of skills development, which relies on a more personal, individualised and holistic approach to training. “It takes into consideration an individual’s character, strengths and weaknesses, as well as personal interests and passions,” the Youngs say of their venture in a course outline.    

If finding the right course designer next door was serendipitous, so too was finding the right building in Heidelberg, an economically depressed town about half an hour’s drive from their Witsand home. 

The Youngs needed a convenient base for their students, most of whom had scant employment prospects without skills development. “Suddenly we found out about an old building next to the biltong shop,” recalls Young of the pivotal project milestone. 

“It used to be a Caltex Station. My wife and I bought it, refurbished it and tiled it using students and their mentors). We also replaced the roof and set up the workshops and tools to support the various technical skills. Then we got some students in there.”  

The Youngs are not your average Overberg pensioners. They have lived and travelled all over the world as Mike pursued a career in the maritime sector which began in 1968. He was involved in all aspects of the business from salvage, subsea operations and machinery design, oil field construction, oil field IRM, drilling support, offshore and onshore terminal operations (LNG, SPMs and FPSOs) and marine transport systems.  

He specialised in global project development, establishing OCTO Marine in 1994 which was taken over by SMIT Internationale in 2000. 

He became a director of five Smit companies and partnership companies worldwide. He was also a Director of Marnavi Offshore Ireland Ltd, an asset owning company focusing on Terminal and oil field related business and founder and Director of Marsol International Limited, an Isle of Man company specialising in oil terminal development and operations providing value-added services to offshore oil terminal operating companies.  

It was this latter role, involving recruitment of suitably-skilled artisans, that led Young to appreciate the value of skills development.  

“The exposure to the offshore terminal market created an understanding of the significant amount of technically based careers that are available based on base technical skills providing the Root Stock on which employers can develop and grow,” says Young.  

He noticed the best job candidates were those with a deep intuitive understanding of technical trades, often as a result of their upbringing:  “We found some of the best guys we could take were farmers’ sons, because the boer maak n plan saying is not a joke – it's actually quite a serious thing. On a farm you learn that kind of logic -- how everything works.”

“That was the driver we had -- how to train people in these multiple skills to lay a solid foundation.”

Easier said than done, Young was to discover as he navigated the complex lanes of government regulation and bureaucracy linked to skills development. Although the course programmes have been certified, the recruits need to be selected by government, as per regulatory requirements.  

There are also funding challenges related to the Sector Education and Training Authority: “We were told we were going to get grants for 20 students for 2026, but in November we were told this wouldn’t happen.”

Worse, the Youngs are unable to fund the project themselves as a stopgap measure, even though the Programme has formal approval. “I said we will start the training using our own funds until the SETA funds came in. But we were told we could not do that for some reason, and if we did then we could not certify our students. There is no logic in that approach. We then had to stall our programme.”

Rather than leave the students in limbo, the Youngs have in the meantime recruited some of them into a commercial Planned Maintenance programme in Witsand. 

The idea is to keep up the skills training momentum and generate income for students while awaiting SETA funding, a process currently in limbo due to government skills development challenges. Explains Young: “The proceeds of this programme will then generate funds to pay for students. This is not asking for donations -- it is selling a service.  

Young says the Planned Maintenance ‘handyman’ programme now requires Government support in order to gain the necessary momentum to become self-sufficient:  “We are offering a proper service to raise funds and expose students to industry, but we need to get the word out to the public somehow.

“We are also working to attract funders and employers but to do so we need track record which is difficult to achieve if the Government is not supporting our programme initially."  

Despite the current challenges, Young believes the Go Maritime Programme is the kind of market-led skills development slowly gaining traction within government circles and endorsed by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana in his latest budget speech. The Programme is also specifically geared to uplift rural areas where ‘hometown’ skills development is not only sorely lacking, but more cost efficient. “This also has a positive effect on the community and provides a sense of self-worth and value.”

“We are now able to establish satellites this being the case we can duplicate our model in other rural areas which allows faster expansion of the certified handy-person programmes for the benefit of those communities.”

“We are working with other centres to set up satellites and to try and access funding, which is not easy. But we are now looking internationally as being in a small town there is no real economy to support students,” says Young.

Peter Haylett, chairman of the Cape Chamber Infrastructure Business Environment Portfolio Committee, said Young and his Programme clearly needed both Government and private sector support: “Mike Young obviously has the energy and willingness to enter the training space.”

“Why does government feel it is the body to select pupils? Government does not appear to have any idea or plan to stream pupils, but operates on a ‘one size fits all’ approach,” Haylett says.