The Ordinary Group connects practicing professionals, institutions & organisations into a living system of mentorship, knowledge & distribution.
The Gap
Over the past three decades, South Africa's education system went through one of the most ambitious restructurings in the world; merging technikons and universities, expanding access, and creating new institutional forms. Much of that work was necessary and overdue.
But something was lost in the process. As practice-oriented institutions adopted academic form, the hands-on, mentor-led pipeline thinned out. Curricula aged in transit. Assessment rewarded recall over capability. And a generation of graduates entered the market able to talk about the work, but without enough reps doing it.
The result is a paradox we all recognise: high unemployment alongside a shortage of skilled people. Not because the talent isn't there. Because the infrastructure to develop, distribute, and recognise it hasn't kept up.
Our Respons
The Network
The Ordinary Group isn't a single programme. It's an ecosystem.
We work with design colleges and communities who want to bring industry into their classrooms. With organisations investing in their senior talent. With practitioners who have something worth saying and need the infrastructure to say it.
And with each other; because the mentors who teach today were the learners who benefited yesterday.
The Team
How It Started
Two accidental conversations.
The Ordinary Group was founded by Alfi Oloo, a designer who almost didn't finish his degree. During his second attempt at second year at the University of Pretoria, two casual conversations with working professionals, one about what creative work actually pays, the other about how to navigate the job market without the right credentials, changed the trajectory of his career.
Those conversations weren't part of any programme. They were accidents. And the question that followed was simple: how many people are waiting for accidents that never come?
After a decade in the design industry, teaching at institutions, mentoring informally, and watching brilliant people struggle with visibility, that question became The Ordinary Group.
