Dr. Paul Lundall

Research Director

Paul Lundall is a sociologist and social science researcher with a specialisation in the field of human resource development and an especially keen interest in understanding the capacity and functioning of skill development systems at a national and regional or provincial level. He was awarded a PhD by the University of Cape Town in 2018 for a dissertation titled: Coordination of Enterprise Skill Formation: A Sociological and Historical Narrative of Professional, Market and State Initiatives in South Africa.

For most of his professional life he has worked in the research terrain. This journey into research started in the 1980s at the South African Labour Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. His worked later extended into the field of education policy particularly after he was recruited to the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Western Cape in 1995. During this period Paul worked on a variety of projects including the large Historically Black Universities (HBU) project, which the Education Policy Unit coordinated. Before leaving the Education Policy Unit he was a lead researcher on the team, which coordinated and produced a large study into Computers in South Africa Schools. This study funded by the International Development Research Centre served as a baseline study into the diffusion of ICTs into general school education in South Africa.

Since 2002 his work has focussed extensively on the South African Skills Development System. While a significant proportion of this research was undertaken for the Department of Labour, Paul also began to undertake more critical policy research, which sought to understand the nature of systemic obstacles within the skills development system, an endeavour which has become more prominent in the research and analytical work which he presently conducts.

Since 2005 Paul has worked as an independent research consultant and has undertaken research for the microeconomic development strategy at the Department of Economic Development and Tourism in the Western Cape. He has undertaken research for a broad spectrum of non-profit and development organisations, including the Centre for Extended Learning, the Labour and Enterprise Policy Research Group at the University of Cape Town, the Learning Cape Initiative, the University of the Western Cape and the South African Clothing and Textile Union.