There is little correlation between what skills software companies need and what the South African education system is producing, says Melina Ng, research officer at Knowledge Crucible.
Ng recently completed researching the impact of the "education gap" between what SA industry needs and what the education system is actually producing. Her findings will be presented at the CITI Software Engineering Colloquium, to be held on 8 May, in Cape Town.
The project compared comments from 17 small to medium companies classified as solutions providers, four large local and foreign-owned companies, four government research institutions, and the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University.
"There is definitely a cost implication for doing business in SA, [especially] if graduates or school-leavers have to be retrained. There is also more of a cost implication for smaller companies, where an insufficiently trained person is felt more acutely than at a large company that has a larger pool of resources," Ng says.
The poor level of training and education also means South African IT labour is more expensive than its overseas peers, she notes. This means that sometimes it is more cost-effective for a company to import those people than use local talent.
"The situation means everyone loses, as the local resources are not fully employed."
Responses to her study included companies stating people with supposedly higher-grade mathematics were unable to compute percentages properly, and that a graduate with a BTech degree could not format a hard drive.
Trivial research
The universities' response to such allegations is that their best students are often recruited early in their studies and soon move overseas following their graduation.
The universities also say fewer students are seeking IT-type degrees due to the "bust in the dot-com boom" of a few years ago. They add that many students prefer to do engineering-type degrees and then possibly enter the software industry.
Companies also bemoaned the fact that tertiary institutions pay little attention to developing project management and business skills among their IT students, failing to recognise that coding only accounts for 20% of a project.
Some companies claimed they preferred to take school-leavers directly as they "came with less baggage and were eager to learn".
Ng says there is also a perception that academia is pursuing trivial research projects.
"There is not enough emphasis at post-graduate level to pursue projects that will stimulate innovation and so benefit the country as a whole."
For information on the CITI Software Engineering Colloquium, click here.
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