Skills guessing game must end

By Leon Engelbrecht for IQ Business Group
Johannesburg, 11 Jul 2007

Indian IT executives are surprised SA cannot quantify its ICT skills shortage or determine a way to measure it.

Prodapt president Vedant Jhaver and COO Ragu Raghuraman were speaking yesterday at the launch of a skills shortage-busting joint venture (JV) with The IQ Business Group.

The deal will see the import of about 150 Indian IT specialists - mostly Java and .Net - over the next 12 to 18 months - if the Department of Home Affairs issues the necessary visas.

"The extent of the skills shortage is a most important question," Raghuraman says. Determining its extent is not difficult, he adds, saying it has been done in India. He explains that what appears lacking in SA is an industry body representing chief information officers.

Such a body exists in India in the form of the National Association of Software and Service Companies. One of its functions is to determine skills requirements, which inform both government policy and the allocation of seats at institutions of higher learning.

Raghuraman says another way to quantify the skills shortage is to determine the loss in national gross domestic product and company profits due to delays in ICT roll-out. "A national association of industries can easily quantify that," he says, as "delays cause losses."

JV head Craig Rodger says he has yet to see a skills shortage figure that can bear scrutiny. But by the same token, nearly every company he and the IQ Business Group deal with that does ICT implementation reports staff shortages.

"They generally have teams of between 10 and 15 people and are between five and six people short [per team]," he says.

Rodger's experience ties in with comments made by deputy communications minister Roy Padayachie last month that there are no quotable figures. "We need to look at what the universities are offering and what business wants and, at same time, have some strategic sense and a development plan for the ICT sector," he said.

Padayachie says Harold Wesso, the department's deputy director-general for policy development, has been tasked with preparing a report on the skills shortage by September to take the debate beyond "thumb-suck" figures.

Anecdotal evidence

Jhaver says the companies are still drafting the final 2007/8 business plan for the JV, to be called ProdaptIQ. He says this will include some quantification of the skills shortage. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests there are "several hundred [vacancies] in Johannesburg alone".

"And that is just a quick snapshot. It could be in the thousands," Jhaver adds.

This view is in line with that of local industry players. Magix Integration director Amir Lubashevsky believes there is not only a shortage of ICT, but also that there is an absence of skills to determine the shortage. In particular, there is a shortage of risk management and security experts, as well as internal IT auditors and forensic investigators familiar with ICT.

"You have a situation where companies buy risk management technology, but the staff they hire to deploy the equipment lack the skills to do so," he says. "It is a situation where you let someone drive a truck when he has a licence for a bicycle."

Decent education needed

ContinuitySA MD Allen Smith adds there is an acute shortage of business continuity (BC) specialists. With BC and disaster recovery becoming ever-more important in the IT governance space, he thinks the country's 50 experts are too few in number.

Smith says: "You will always have a skills shortage if you don't have a decent education system. That should be the first priority."

Orion Telecom MD Jacques du Toit says it can take up to a year to train a staff member and turn him or her into a productive employee.

iLayo Software Solutions MD Inana Nkanza says companies are reluctant to invest in such staff training as these employees often get poached by rivals shortly after becoming productive. "In a market where we are all chasing skills, we will rather pay for ready-made skills than invest in people who defect."