Brain drain is bane of the new economy

The results are alarming: 54% of respondents are considering leaving South Africa within the next two years; 26% said they are "very likely" and a further 28% somewhat likely to be seeking employment abroad.

Equally worrying are the reasons for leaving, as there is little anyone can do to counter them in the short-term.

Some 34% of respondents cited better opportunity as their reason for looking for greener pastures, while 26% listed economic reasons, which at a time of the weak rand is no surprise. Some 20% said they would leave to gain experience, which is a positive initiative, if only they would also consider coming back.

Simon White, joint-MD of research company Forge-Ahead BMI-T, says the industry "should certainly encourage people to move and gain experience".

"Most of the black IT professionals I know would leave to gain international experience, but they would come back to the country," he says.

However, hope is slim that the 20% of the respondents who want to leave because of crime would want to come back any time soon.

Mark Bussin, partner at 21^st Century Business and Pay Solutions, notes that the outflow of skills is not an IT-only phenomenon, but "the IT folk can leave a lot easier. But whether they`ll find jobs as easily as those who went over the last couple of years is another question."

Recent massive job cuts that swept the international IT industry certainly raise this question. But placement agencies are hard-pressed to keep up with the interest expressed by local techies turning to greener pastures and the lure of lucrative salaries in foreign currency.

Peter Maybury, MD of Global Options, says there are two main reasons for local skills leaving the country. "In the first case, we see a lot of younger twenty-somethings being lured by the salaries they hear about and the fact that most of their friends have contracted overseas. But we are seeing more and more over 50s looking to get out of the country too.

"We often hear about a violent crime or a retrenchment when we interview these candidates. They are desperate to start a life overseas, away from the social problems in SA," he says.

The amount of local candidates looking to leave is so large, that a number of consultancies have set up in SA to focus exclusively on this market.

Offshore recruitment companies have also journeyed to SA to actively headhunt skilled staff.

Simon Kemp, director of Leapfrog Careers, came to SA last year looking for suitable candidates.

"They [South Africans] have high skill sets and an excellent work ethic," says Kemp.

Leapfrog went so far as to help successful applicants find accommodation in London and put them in contact with fellow South African ex-pats.

Corporates are not the only ones poaching South African talent. The burgeoning Internet economy has led the Irish Republic to go all out to facilitate easy immigration.

Immigration to Ireland is as easy as obtaining a letter of employment from an Ireland-based company and reporting to the Department of Aliens in Dublin, where a six-month visa will be issued, renewable whenever necessary.

Jill Hamlyn, MD of The People Business, says it`s tragic that our techies are not looking at their opportunities here and taking advantage of the accelerated growth that other countries don`t provide. "You can go far further in South Africa than you can anywhere in the world because there are more gaps - because everybody`s left."

So the exodus continues. Cape IT Solutions, an employee consultancy based in the Netherlands, has an agreement with Pretoria-based Abacus Recruitment for placement of high-level South African IT skills in the Netherlands.

According to Karen Geldenhuys, a director of Abacus, 20 candidates have already been placed, and another 100 positions are expected to be filled by the end of the year, with a further 100 planned for during 2002.

Geldenhuys says the export of local IT skills is a "booming business", but adds that the trend is extremely alarming. "We are losing too many IT skills to countries like the UK, US, the Netherlands and Ireland.

"I wish we could say that our deal with Cape IT Solutions will see us bring in much-needed skills into SA from overseas, but this is just not going to happen. The outflow is far, far larger than the inflow."

President Thabo Mbeki recognised the problem in his State of the Nation speech on 9 February: "Government has approved a human resource development strategy that will enable us to launch an accelerated skills development programme for those areas that are critical to a more competitive economy.

"Immigration laws and procedures will be reviewed urgently to enable us to attract skills into our country. Improvements in maths and science education will also be prioritised."

Following the President`s cue, local government officials said new immigration laws will be in place by the end of the year to attract new skills, especially in IT.

Skills developers and employment agencies have been urgently petitioning the government to review existing immigration laws which hamper foreigners wishing to work in SA.

Minister Essop Pahad was quoted as saying government believes there are a number of foreign workers with the necessary skills to fill the gap, most notably from India, which will be used as a recruiting ground for IT staff, and Russia for the scientific industries.

Geldenhuys says the fact that the bill is "now in motion" is reassuring.

"It`s by no means a perfect bill. But one thing that it does do is replace official discretion in the granting of permits with a seemingly simple solution: employers have to motivate the reasons why they need a foreigner to fill a post and convince the SA officials that no South African is currently available to fill the post. This is much in line with how it works in other First World countries."

Recruitment specialist Bryan Hattingh says the government must get back to basics.

"The government must focus on treating the cause and not the symptoms. SA would be an ideal destination for IT workers despite the weak rand. It is easier to earn R10 than it is to earn lb1, but no one wants to come here when crime is out of control," says Hattingh.

An ideal solution is to address the skills shortage at the education level, creating a fresh pool of IT workers.

Forge-Ahead`s White says part of the problem is the lack of vision in the educational sector. "The educational institutions didn`t have the foresight a couple of years ago to address the skills shortage, and the various industry bodies we founded lack in efficiency. It`s time for 'organised business` to get really organised and help the government set its priorities in skills development."

Adrian Schofield, president, Information Industry South Africa, expresses the same sense of urgency: "It is a matter of urgent necessity that our education systems produce a far greater number of science and mathematics matriculants and graduates.

"It is a matter of urgent necessity that the employers of IT skills invest in new entrants to the industry and cease hiding behind the labour laws in avoiding this responsibility."

Comment by Bryan Hattingh, recruitment specialist

No clear statistics are available to show just how many IT workers SA has lost to foreign countries. However, we can rest assured that the movement of our skilled IT staff from this country is prolific.

IT has never been regarded as a profession, so unlike the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, we have no accurate figures of how many qualified workers there are in the country at any one time.

Another problem is that the Department of Home Affairs only has records of people giving up their citizenship when they emigrate.

The amount of people who give up their citizenship when they leave the country are the minority. Many workers contract overseas for two to three years and there is no record of them emigrating, even through their skills are for that period lost to the local economy.