Johannesburg, 26 Oct 2011
I am going to make a highly controversial and unpopular prediction, but facts are facts: within a decade more than 80% of the "local" IT profession will be staffed by Indians. All of this while our unemployment percentage keeps on getting higher and the divide between the haves and the have-nots broadens.
South Africa is already the country, along with Brazil, which has the greatest Gini coefficient in terms of the gap between those who have wealth and those who do not.
And yet we need to import skills to deliver projects, some highly skilled, some less so, says Ziaan Hattingh, MD of IndigoCube.
As an example, we have two artisan colleges, one in Westlake, one in Olifantsfontein, which are at under 5% utilisation. Then, as a country, we import thousands of Polish and Thai engineers to fulfil jobs in a country with 45% unemployment.
This points to an education system (from school through to university and colleges) that is failing to produce the skills required by business in the country, and this is a problem that in the long-term needs to be addressed from the bottom up.
This is further compounded by the fact that our IT education system (mainly universities) is a few years behind business trends and the lack of a formal professional structure for IT exacerbates this.
In addition, several years ago large institutions such as banks and insurance companies, under financial pressure, disbanded their internal training structures. This was the breeding ground for many of today`s IT superstars. Without this feeder system, we will struggle to fulfil the internal IT requirements of tomorrow.
This is a difficult issue to address because of the rapid and ongoing changes in IT, but it does mean that few IT graduates leave adequately skilled to enter the job market - unlike some of the professions such as engineering, law and medicine, which have formal structures in place to bridge the gap between academic training and the professional environment.
This means that business is left with two options:
1) Hire only experienced people (increasingly from India), or
2) Develop young graduates into skilled IT professionals using rapid skills development learnerships.
The latter has a much better return on investment, even after just one year, and continues to be more attractive than option one for at least five years. If companies don`t do this, we face a period of at least a decade (maybe more, depending on how long it takes the government to fix the education system, if indeed it has the will, which is another issue), of serious skills shortages that will have to be staffed from outside the country.
In a country with such a chronic unemployment challenge, we import doctors and teachers from Cuba; engineers from Poland and Thailand; and IT specialists from India. Surely the answer must be to grow our own.
This has particular relevance in the domain of business analysis. It is estimated by those who know that South Africa needs more than 6 000 business analysts (BAs). Yet there are few programmes in place to grow our own.
BAs are critical to ensuring software success: so applications deliver in terms of customer specifications, fitness for purpose and budget.
Without properly qualified BAs, companies cannot perform requirements extraction, produce appropriate specification documents, and align subsequent programs with business need. BAs are the key to delivering applications today, and moving to bring business in line with evolving trends, such as agile.
We need to roll our own, rather than import skills from India. This implies a deep commitment to training, with budget and all that entails.
Nothing else makes sense.
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