Prospective university students should take note of the recent revival in the IT discipline, which has taken an upward turn since the dotcom collapse, says Dr Dalenca Pottas, interim director for the School of ICT at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
He was speaking ahead of IT Innovation Day, scheduled for 31 October, where 20 of the top third-year students and 10 fourth-year students will be will be exhibiting their development projects.
Rudolph Muller, founder of MyADSL and lecturer at the Department of Business IT at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), says ICT remains one of the fastest growing fields, with great opportunities locally and internationally.
He adds that the world is becoming a single marketplace, and nowhere is it more pronounced than in the ICT sector.
Growth
"The use of ICT in the workplace and social environment is still a very fast growing field because the field of ICT is far wider than Internet-related technology. Software development, mobile technology and convergent technology are examples of such developments."
He explains that because SA is a few years behind the rest of the world when it comes to Internet related issues, the dotcom crash did not affect SA as significantly as it did the developed world (especially the US).
"We have seen great enrolment at the Department of Business IT at UJ," says Muller.
The Department of Labour says the private sector needs to be involved in this revival by placing graduates on learnerships. "The minister sees ICT skills as crucial for SA if we are going to meet our 6% growth target and strongly encourages new entrants to the field," says Mokgadi Pela, spokesman for the Department of Labour.
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