Johannesburg, 20 Nov 2015
Education trends indicate many graduates from IT tertiary institutions leave with developing and coding skills on paper, but are incapable of performing when tested in the real world.
According to Russell Hollick, Chief Executive: Product Architecture at ERP provider SYSPRO, this is because institutions follow a canned learning approach to training tertiary students.
"Accessing scarce and much needed development and testing skills in the market has always been a challenge. For this reason, we launched our developer intern programme over 10 years ago.
"We often found that there was a wide disconnect between IT qualifications on paper and applicants' actual skill set when put to the test. Our tertiary IT institutions often churn out IT students who are not fit for purpose. What's more, however, we find this 'canned learning' at tertiary institutions is a global phenomenon and not just a local problem."
In the South African context, the Department of Higher Education and Training's national scarce skills list is dominated by engineering and technical professions, with software developers high up on the list for scarce IT skills.
Hollick says SYSPRO's head office runs an internship developer programme every two years, where it takes 10-12 tertiary students out of university and pairs them up with a senior developer for coaching over a six-month period. The company has found a direct correlation between students' math skills and their coding ability, and so expects applicants to have achieved at least a 60% core mathematics mark in their matric finals. He says to access quality graduates, SYSPRO has partnered with Belgium Campus, a local tertiary IT university, and offers graduates from the campus internships to further build up the IT skills pool.
"Some developers at other companies spend years working on run-of-the-mill solutions like financial software, for example, which can be repetitive and limiting. Our young interns need opportunities to develop and grow and we give them the chance to learn many types of new software, including working on the latest innovative technologies like mobile and machine learning."
He says the company's interns - in fact all its development staff - have the opportunity to work with the most experienced developers on a range of software. Having staff at all levels working on projects together stretches them - encouraging them to grow and excel. As an example, SYSPRO runs a 'Skunkworks' programme, allowing virtually anyone to put up their hand and be involved with a wide range of projects across a broad spectrum of topics. Most of these 'Skunkworks' projects are aimed at solving challenges in a creative way, but still requiring a practical outcome.
Hollick concludes that of the total pool of developers at SYSPRO, over 44% of them have been trained within the company, and despite the high IT skilled staff churn rate at most IT companies, he finds almost all of them remain with SYSPRO.
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