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The facts in fiction

Does SA have a skills shortage, or is this an urban legend, as was claimed this week?
Kimberly Guest
By Kimberly Guest, ITWeb contributor
Johannesburg, 24 May 2007

As a mother of two young kids, I spend a good hour every night reading children's stories. It never ceases to amaze me how many lessons in reality these works of fiction offer our offspring.

Take for instance Hansel and Gretel: this Grimm Brothers masterpiece starts in a setting of unemployment and poverty. More than 200 years after its writing, its background is still relevant to people all over the world, particularly a large portion of our own citizens.

Which brings me to the statements made by Employment Equity Commission chairman Jimmy Manyi earlier this week.

According to Manyi, SA's skills shortage is an "urban legend". Instead, SA is underutilising skilled black people due to white-controlled businesses choosing to ignore their offerings, Business Day quoted him as saying.

Derision of these statements has come fast and furiously from all sectors. After all, it flies in the face of what has been acknowledged by business and government to be a real inhibitor of the country's growth.

Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if he doesn't have a point. Perhaps, like my Grimm Brothers book of stories, SA's skills debate is a question of fact within fiction.

Skills paradox

SA sits with an interesting paradox: the private and public sectors contend there is a skills shortage in the country. Yet our unemployment rate continues to be a challenge. How is it that the two scenarios can coexist for such a long period of time?

It's opportunism in its best form - see a gap and offer a solution that brings in the bucks.

Senior journalist, ITWeb

I am well aware there are organisations out there battling to find human capital. However, I am equally aware of the fact that there are many skilled people who are desperately trying to find a job without success.

Of course, we are also not above using the skills "crisis" to our advantage.

The IT industry, with its outsourcing and service-type offerings, has been quick to tell potential customers that the skills shortage could hamper business operations in the future. Pass this risk onto us, they say, inferring they are somehow immune to its effects.

It's opportunism in its best form - see a gap and offer a solution that brings in the bucks.

In reality

I have to wonder whether we are hyping the very real concern of IT skills shortages to levels of fantasy for the benefit of our bottom line. I even wonder if some companies are being deliberately slow in implementing training programmes to ensure this crisis is not averted too soon.

If this is the case, more people like Manyi are going to stand up and call our bluff. And industry will once again land up being the big bad beast that manoeuvred the public and private sectors into financial investments that, in retrospect, will be believed to have been with little merit.

Tonight, I think I will read Aesop's "The boy who cried wolf" to my children. While the story is fictional, the moral findings are based in fact. Untruthfully cry wolf too many times and your audience loses confidence in anything you have to say.

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