Companies criticise South African IT graduates for not having enough initiative or creativity, concludes a survey by the Cape IT Initiative (CITI).
The CITI survey was commissioned ahead of the software engineering colloquium scheduled for 8 May in Cape Town, to find 'pain points' for software companies that operate in the Western Cape.
The survey, conducted by Knowledge Crucible, sampled a cross-section of software engineers, end-users, academics and government departments. It showed end-users were becoming increasingly disheartened by the lack of innovation in their software graduates.
CITI executive director Viola Manuel says: "More than a simple lack of skills, of which we are all aware, some companies said staff became intellectually lazy shortly after joining them and questioned whether our academia were adequately preparing students to compete in an aggressive international market."
Manuel says companies are also competing for the same pool of people and this increases the cost of software development in the province and the country.
"It is a two-sided issue, as companies can be very prescriptive about what their new employees have to deliver, but there is also a trend to rote learn in academia. Local companies are increasingly having to pay higher salaries to get the people they need and this could endanger the country's competitiveness in this field," she says.
Standardisation needed
David Hislop, convenor of the software engineering colloquium's technical advisory committee, says another side to the problem is the lack of a central industry certification standard.
"The people are there. However, while there are a lot of programmers, not all are suited to work in the corporate environment and companies are hiring people with very flimsy qualifications. What we need is for a way whereby companies can see they are getting the right people," he says.
Melina Ng of Knowledge Crucible says other pain points cited by companies were the bandwidth constraints, the fact that graduates found it relatively easy to job-hop and so find better salaries quickly, and the lack of co-ordination between industry, various government departments and academia.
Ng surveyed 17 solution providers based in the Western Cape, six national big companies with a presence in the province, and four Western Cape academic institutions.
"We need to develop a better idea of 'clustering' and so get everyone to work together," Manuel says.
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