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Public sector skills: vision needed

Government needs to build up skills for its own needs as well as the country's. That won't be easy.

Paul Furber
By Paul Furber, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 23 Aug 2010

Mention IT in the public sector to anyone who's in the business and they will immediately think of glacial payment cycles, frustrations dealing with Sita and the endless struggle to align their organisations with government's needs. What's not normally mentioned is skills. But government needs IT skills, and soon.

The minister for performance management, monitoring and evaluation has made it clear that government departments are going to have to implement outcomes-based management and that they will be measured on their performance. That will require not only considerable help from the private sector, but also a depth of in-house skills that government doesn't have. It tried in 2006 to create a giant pool of talent with the Integrated Financial Management System but, as Emma Murray, country manager for Software AG, notes, the project has fizzled.

"When I went to Govtech three years ago, government stood up and spoke about spending R10 billion to R15 billion over the next 10 to 12 years, and the point was creating a sector and a knowledge base," she says. "It didn't want to buy an off-the-shelf package but rather to have people come in and learn Java and write a bespoke solution. They would then have a couple of thousand people who would have IT skills. Somehow or other, this whole thing has gone horribly pear-shaped."

One of the reasons is government is a great stepping stone to the private sector. Sign up, get some training and experience and within a very short time (weeks in some cases), a trainee can head off to private industry and earn much more.

Greg Vercellotti, director at Dariel Solutions, says the economy hasn't helped either.

"What we're finding is that we've gone from a skills crisis two years ago, into a skills shortage during the downturn and we're now entering a skills crisis again - and I mean the high-end skills. The skills industry is like a population pyramid - you need a lot of people coming through to support the upper layers and to move into them. But in South Africa, our population is shaped like an inverted pyramid. We don't have enough people coming in to fill the gaps that are there. We need to have the discussion about how we change this now because otherwise we're only going to feel the real effects in 20 years' time - and by then it will be too late."

Compounding this problem are the expectations of the new generation, says Selaelo Makgato, service delivery director at Vharanai Consulting.

"People born between 1990 and 1999, the current Internet generation, are going to bring a change to the IT environment. It's going to be like a tsunami. It's going to change the way the workplace works and it's up to the television era people - ourselves - to align themselves so that when the new generation comes, companies will be ready."

Back to basics

But will the Internet generation be equipped in the first place? Aranka Versteer, business unit manager for skills at Gijima, says the challenge is huge.

"We're working closely with the department of education, and the challenges they face to take technology to the youth is vast," she says. "They're putting up labs but it costs so much to put in the necessary security to keep the labs running. As they put the technology in, it gets stolen. There is an initiative running with Gauteng Online to assist deaf students by giving them laptops, but the risk of the students being assaulted and the laptops stolen is too high. We require a mind shift in this country to take technology to schools. But school results decrease the moment they start integrating technology because the curriculum doesn't take it into account."

President Ntuli, public sector lead for enterprise servers, storage and networking at HP SA, says we need to go back to basics.

"Two years ago the pass rate of university acceptance was 15%. I think we need to go back further and introduce subjects related to technology much earlier. At the moment, people are moving to more social sciences instead of taking technology subjects and the gap is widening. If you look at the South African education space, especially at the tertiary level, there are a lot of institutions offering IT qualifications that are maybe three to six months long. I don't want to call them fly-by-nights, but are they really aligned to what the industry needs?

“The other contributor is the high rate of HIV infection. We lose a lot of skills - knowledgeable and skilled people - to HIV. To bridge that gap is going to be a challenge. I think 26% of our youth are infected. How do we then build a model where retiring people can pass on skills to the youth?"

The challenges public sector employees face are vast.

President Ntuli, public sector lead for enterprise servers, storage and networking, HP

Makgato says everyone needs to be involved.

"The responsibility for ensuring that the youth gets the right training should come from the public education institutions, from government as a sponsor and, lastly, from the corporate environment. If you have all three involved, then you have a good matrix with which to work. Skills transfer needs to be a priority."

Ntuli agrees.

"If government started investing and opening up strategy initiatives, then the corporate world would be there - investing in skills, providing solutions and making sure the youth join in," he says.

Vercellotti wants to know what the private sector is up to.

"We've adopted three or four schools for underprivileged children and put labs in there with the express understanding that kids will get access to the Internet and play with software. We're starting to see some of the excitement and interest now. These kids haven't had the same opportunities that the more privileged kids have had. But the children who haven't had access at an early age will be just as backward as my poor father is when it comes to a mouse and PC. So the private sector has a role to play."

But as Versteer points out, geography is a problem, even when your organisation is committed to improving skills.

"South Africa's problem is that there is a hub in Gauteng and all the infrastructure and knowledge is concentrated here. We've tried to take SAP into Limpopo, but the consultants want to stay in Gauteng. So we've developed incubators that recruit people in the local area, upskill them, perhaps by bringing them to Gauteng, but then returning them to those regions, and it's proved very difficult. Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and certain areas of KZN all have that problem. And the numbers in those regions aren't big enough to get those incubators going."

Career paths

Even when skills programmes are in place and working, there's the problem of job-hopping. This is particularly prevalent in the public sector, says Ntuli.

"We deal with a lot of public sector employees and one of their problems is a lack of career path. In the private sector, you can come in and there is a clear career path that you can follow but many in the public sector see no training or development aligned to their skills. So they get frustrated and leave."

Versteer has seen it too.

"Private companies need to change their mindsets," she says. "They don't want to train people, otherwise they'll build up their CV and then move on. I'm seeing that mindset in the public sector partly because the staff turnover is so high, but also because they haven't seen the value of education and training in the workplace. Many of our government departments have this mindset: 'I'm not going to fully upskill this individual because otherwise I will lose him/her.' So the youth get frustrated but, on the other hand, if they do get upskilled, they jump ship. People need to know that if they stick around, they'll move forward."

Murray points out that part of the problem is that the nature of the IT industry has changed.

"When I started in the IT game, I was given a lot more opportunity to try different things," she says. "Today, there's a lot more structure and a lot less opportunity to learn on the job. We're not prepared to let people make mistakes and learn on the customer's time because there's an SLA involved. But that's what happened 15 to 20 years ago. You were given some software, you were lucky if there was a manual and you sat on site until 4am until you figured out how it worked."

It's going to be like a tsunami.

Selaelo Makgato, service delivery director, Vharanai Consulting

There's also the ramping-up effect, notes Vercellotti.

"The IT industry has a natural ramp-up where skilled people need to be paid a lot more based on their experience and companies need to plan for that. The other thing is that you have to give young people opportunities. They can be creative and innovative in their problem solving in ways that we don't understand. They've played with this technology from very early on: a mouse in their hands is like a knife and fork to them. It's in their blood and they can teach us things about the Internet and social networking, so we can give back to them."

Alignment

Making that happen needs preparation and it needs to happen now, says Makgato.

"How can we make sure the alignment between organisations and the new generation happens?" he asks. "Technology and the way the youth are using technology are both becoming disruptive. You can't hide from people using technology to communicate. People are using Twitter and other social media to communicate and that is changing how organisations work. We need to empower ourselves and make sure we're abreast of what current technology is capable of."

But the leadership must come from government. Comments Vercellotti: "I heard Angela Merkel speak at CeBit this year and she said that in five years, every German citizen would have a broadband connection. And then she explained how government would take IT to the people, but also how it would use IT within government. I understand that in South Africa, IT can't be at the top of the agenda - there's housing and poverty and water - so there's a whole bunch of other priorities. But I don't see IT on the national agenda. I don't see a national strategy to make us an information economy and with that, the skills development and excitement to make it happen. I think they see IT as an add-on to whatever they're doing at the moment. If government sets the vision and the goals and objectives, then the private sector would come because the money and the impetus would be there."

Makgato is upbeat, though.

"We've got government on the one hand doing a bit and the private sector on the other also doing a bit. We have to appreciate that like assembling a puzzle, it will require patience and time and the trust that all the pieces will fit together."

Hopefully it won't take 20 years to find out we were wrong.

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