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Survey sheds light on ICT skills

Jacob Nthoiwa
By Jacob Nthoiwa, ITWeb journalist.
Johannesburg, 03 Aug 2009

The global economic downturn has placed immense pressure on SA's development as well as talent across industries. The 2009 ICT Skills Survey hopes to reveal how this crisis has affected the ICT skills situation in SA, according to Adrian Schofield, manager of the Applied Research Unit of the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) at Wits University.

The survey ran on ITWeb last month and is now in the analysis phase.

This is the second year that ITWeb and the JCSE conducted the survey, in an effort to identify the most pressing skills needs in the South African corporate environment, assess the current skills capacity of practitioners, and discover their intentions for future skills development.

“We are keen to establish whether the economic downturn that impacted the world just after we had published the 2008 results will have a significant effect on the South African ICT skills market,” says Schofield.

He notes that while it is logical to expect a reduced demand for ICT services as companies tighten their budgets, “this may not have filtered through to the service providers yet”.

However, he says, they do expect the predictions for hiring new employees made last year will be scaled back in this year's results. “We are also looking to see if the news of returning expatriates is having any effect,” Schofield adds. The analysis will also look for any other trends emerging from the new data.

Looking back

Last year's survey suggested the 'real' skills shortage going into 2009 could be as high as 70 000 practitioners - more than 25% of the current workforce. The survey showed most respondents expected their ICT staff numbers to grow by between 10% and 50%.

“Last year the practitioners' responses showed that there was a gap in the pool of younger, qualified, and experienced people,” says Schofield. The survey also showed that a number of talented professionals left the country for greener pastures overseas.

The survey concluded that industry needed to work together to make ICT careers more attractive to young people.

Some 111 valid responses were received from corporate executives in last year's survey, more than half of whom were at C-level status within their enterprise. Almost 75% of the companies were located in Gauteng, 60% were privately-owned, with a further 15% being South African-listed companies. Over 40% had less than 50 employees, with a further 20% having between 50 and 250 staff members.

“As we enter the analysis phase of this year's annual survey, we are encouraged to continue developing the value proposition that this independent research offers,” Schofield states. Support from the Information Technology Association, Women in IT, and the Computer Society SA underlines the survey's relevance across the sector.

The survey's analysis will be done by the JCSE.

The survey was introduced in 2008 as a partnership between ITWeb and the JCSE, with the intention of setting a base level from which to identify ICT skills trends in future annual surveys.

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