South Africa is producing young people with immense potential, but many of these young people are not able to realise that potential due to such high youth unemployment. At the same time, our economy has severe structural shortages in specific skill areas, software development being one. One of the tragedies in South Africa is that we have young people finishing diplomas and degrees in a field such as software development and IT – in which there are shortages of skilled people – yet they are still not be able to find employment.
We at Chillisoft have directly seen that when these young people are provided an opportunity to gain experience and to learn from industry veterans, they thrive and grow, and it is sad to know that many are languishing without having the same opportunity afforded to them.
At Chillisoft, we have been trying to do our part to help in this, with a graduate programme that each year, with 2026 being no exception, takes in a small cohort and invests in their careers. In fact, our graduate programme is a core aspect of our sustainability strategy – it continually brings in young people and grows them, passing on skills, allowing us to keep our team ever refreshed.
The programme has, over the past eight years, been very successful, not necessarily in raw numbers, as our company is not a large consultancy, but certainly when measured in quality of output and impact, both on their lives and on the company's capacity. Each year (although interrupted for a while by Covid-19), Chillisoft brings on two to three young people that go through a curated training programme, which has ranged from four to 12 months, as we have experimented with formats. After they complete the apprenticeship programme, candidates that get through the material successfully and fit our team needs at the time are drafted into development teams as fulltime employees of Chillisoft.
The programme currently features hands-on courses on source control, C#, JavaScript, test-driven development, clean architecture, core coding principles, HTTP, ASP.NET and Angular, as well as single-day workshops on 'The Professional Software Developer', 'Security Concepts for Developers', and 'Lean Principles'. These courses help to prepare developers for the real-world full-stack business software development that Chillisoft does, and the curriculum helps to ensure that no matter what path a person has taken (self-taught, university, college or other), they have a baseline of applicable knowledge when they join a team. Currently, the programme runs for six months – four months of course work along with two months of hands-on development for an internal or client project, allowing the young developers to work in a real-world setting.
An important component of any graduate programme is candidate selection, and at Chillisoft, we have been careful to ensure that candidates are likely to be suitable for drafting into our teams after their learning/training period is complete. The outcomes have borne this out: out of 13 past apprentices, 12 have been drafted in after their training period.
Furthermore, 11 out of those 12 developers drafted into our teams over the past seven years are still with the company. Six of these young people have had the chance to be part of an overseas project, providing them with incredible experience and demonstrating the effectiveness of a programme like this that is taken seriously and invests early on into developers' careers: it allows them to harness their own potential earlier than might otherwise be the case, and for society to benefit from that, both in the software they write and in their ability to support themselves and their families.
There is a lot of talk about a reduction in junior software development positions due to AI. At Chillisoft, our view is that young developers need to get ahead of AI and make themselves more valuable in capability than a coding LLM as quickly as they possibly can. One of the metrics used in Chillisoft’s recruitment process is identifying candidates who complete the required technical assessment without over-reliance on AI tools. This approach helps us to short-list candidates who demonstrate genuine self-learning, critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, while encouraging a mindset that values understanding over instant gratification. This continues into the programme – while they may use AI, the key is for them to develop conceptual understanding, technical knowledge, reasoning and problem-solving capabilities and interpersonal skills through intense input from other software developers. We can't simply hire young people and hope, we need to be intentional about guiding their learning and investing in them.
The results we've seen make it clear that a well-constructed graduate programme can have a real impact on the lives of young people as well as on the success of companies. We call on all players in the software development industry or anyone employing software developers at all to do their part in providing pathways for young people (or those switching careers) to enter the software development profession on a solid footing.
If you would want to talk about running a graduate programme for your organisation, we can help to design and execute one – contact info@chillisoft.co.za.
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