Privacy policy for the Career Office

Who is responsible for your information

Skills Academy Supported Learning (Pty) Ltd, trading as Skills Academy (company registration number 2018/396931/07), is the responsible party for the personal information the Career Office handles. The Career Office is also used by Skills Academy's sister colleges, Matric College and Bellview Institute of Distance Learning.

Cape Town (support and finance office): Unit 53B, Mega Park, corner of Peter Barlow and Mill Road, Bellville South, 7530
Pretoria (registration office): 4th Floor, Standard Plaza, 440 Hilda Street, Hatfield, Pretoria, 0028

Our Information Officer is Jan Badenhorst, and our Deputy Information Officers are Nurah Kamal and Charne Swartz. To reach the Information Officer, or to ask anything about this policy, email support@skillsacademy.edu.za.

Who this covers

This policy covers the Career Office website and services for the students who use it and the staff who work in it. We handle personal information in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

The Career Office is for people aged 18 and over. You must be 18 or older to create an account, and we do not knowingly collect information about anyone younger. If you think a child has given us their details, tell us and we will delete them.

What we collect

Only what the thing you are using needs.

If you use the free tools

You do not need to give us anything. Your aptitude test answers are scored and the result is sent back to you — the answers are not stored.

If you ask an advisor a question

Your name.
Your student number and email address, if you choose to give them.
Your question, and the advisor's reply.

If we help you with a CV, cover letter or interview

Your name, contact details and student number.
Your work history, education and skills — what you tell us, and what is in any CV you send.
Job adverts you send us, and your answers to our questions.
The documents we make for you.

If you work in the Career Office

Your work email address, when you sign in and out, and a record of what you did with each request — for example, who released a document.

Why we use it

To give you the help you asked for: to write your documents, answer your question, or score your test.
To contact you about your request.
To keep a record of who did what, so mistakes can be traced and put right.
To see how long students wait for replies, using totals rather than anyone's details, so the service can get faster.

We do not sell your information, and we do not send your details to employers. You decide who receives your CV.

Who else handles it

Career Office staff see what they need to help you. Beyond them, these service providers handle information for us, only to run the service, and under terms that require them to protect it:

Supabase stores your account, the questions you send an advisor, Contact-page messages, payment records and documents you save to your account. It holds them in Ireland.
Render runs the website and the service, in Germany.
Cloudflare passes the website's traffic to you and runs the check that a form is being filled in by a person, not a program.
Google, through its Gemini service, helps draft your documents and interview feedback from what you send for that purpose. On the paid service we use, Google does not use it to improve its products, and may keep it for a short time to detect misuse.
Google Fonts supplies the lettering on our pages, so your browser contacts Google when a page opens. No personal information is sent with that.
If you answer a practice interview question out loud, your browser's own speech-to-text turns it into words. In Chrome that is provided by Google. Only the words reach us.

Information sent outside South Africa

All of these providers process information outside South Africa: Supabase and Render in the European Union, and Google and Cloudflare in other countries as well. We use them because they are bound by laws or agreements that protect personal information at least as well as POPIA does, as section 72 of POPIA requires.

Documents you build in the browser, your interview notes and your course progress are put together on your own phone or computer and saved there. They are not uploaded unless you save a document to your account.

How long we keep it

Much of what you make here stays on your device. What does reach us is kept only as long as the reason for having it lasts, and then deleted.

What	Where	How long
Your CV and your cover letter	Your device	Saved in the browser you built them in. They stay there until you delete them, or until you clear your browsing data.
A document you save to your account	The service	Kept until you delete it, or until your account is deleted.
Your interview notes and your answers in the programme	Your device	The same: saved in that browser, and gone when you clear it. On a shared computer, clear your browsing data when you finish.
The CV or job advert you paste in	Not kept	Sent to write the document you asked for, and discarded straight after. Only the document comes back to you.
A practice interview, written or spoken	Not kept	A spoken answer is turned into text and the recording is discarded straight away. The questions, your answers and the feedback are not stored; keep the feedback by printing or saving it.
Your account — name, email address and student number	The service	Kept until 12 months after your access ends: a year after your paid 12 months or your enrolment ends, or, for a free account, a year after you last signed in. Documents saved to your account go with it. Ask the Career Office and it is deleted sooner.
The student number on an enrolment claim that was turned down	The service	Removed 90 days after the decision.
A question you asked an advisor, and the reply	The service	Kept for 2 years after it is answered, so you can look back at it, then deleted. The private reference that lets you see the reply is saved in your browser.
A message sent from the Contact page	The service	Kept for 2 years, then deleted.
A request the Career Office worked on for you	The service	Your answers and the documents made from them are deleted 6 months after the request is closed. A document still in use is kept until its own date has passed.
A payment for Premium	The service	Who paid, how much and when, and any refund, kept for 7 years. Nothing else about you is kept with it, and it stays even if your account is deleted.
The record of what was done to an account	The service	Which staff action, by whom and when, never what the account holds. Kept for 2 years.
Technical logs of warnings and errors	The service	When something goes wrong the service records what failed, so it can be fixed. Warnings and errors only, never ordinary use, and never your name, your email address or anything you wrote — where a line needs to tell two people apart it uses a scrambled reference that cannot be turned back into an address. Kept for 30 days, then deleted.
Aptitude test answers	Not kept	Scored as they are sent, and discarded straight after. Only the result comes back.

Keeping it safe

Only signed-in Career Office staff can see requests and documents.
Staff accounts lock after repeated wrong passwords.
The record of staff actions cannot be edited or deleted by staff.
When you check on a question you asked, you use a private reference that cannot be guessed, rather than a number someone could work through.

Cookies and your device

Signing in sets a cookie that keeps you signed in. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

When you ask an advisor a question, a private reference is saved in your browser so you can see the reply later. Anyone using the same browser can see those questions and replies, so on a shared or public computer, clear your browsing data when you finish.

Our pages load their fonts from Google Fonts, so your browser contacts Google when a page opens.

Your rights

Under POPIA you can ask us to:

tell you what personal information we hold about you, and give you a copy;
correct anything that is wrong or out of date;
delete information we no longer have a reason to keep, including your master CV;
stop using your information for a particular purpose.

You can also withdraw your consent at any time. It does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.

Contact and complaints

To use any of these rights, or to ask about this policy, email our Information Officer at support@skillsacademy.edu.za, or send the Career Office a message. We reply within 30 days.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Regulator.