ITA to quantify skills shortage

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 07 Aug 2007

The presidency is looking to the Information Technology Association (ITA) as a body to possibly define and quantify SA's ICT skills shortage.

The entire management committee of the ITA has been summoned to meet with the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA) secretariat this afternoon, in the hope that the industry body can clear up some of the uncertainty around how the skills shortage is currently being quantified.

JIPSA forms part of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for SA (Asgisa), under which ICT skills have been classified as being critically short in the country.

According to Dr Thabo Lehlokoe, VP of the ITA, the organisation needs to clear the air of confusing numbers over how may ICT specialists the country needs. "There are so many numbers being thrown around and there is uncertainty as to their validity," says Lehlokoe.

"We need to understand what government wants to do and government must also understand the private sector." Lehlokoe is concerned that there shouldn't be "training for the sake of training - it needs to be put into perspective".

He says: "As an organisation and as IT employers, we need to know what role to engage when we train, so that we are training relevant skills."

Defining the shortage

Ilan Fluxman, MD of Rocket Science Recruitment, agrees that it is very difficult not only to gauge the skills shortage, but to determine whether SA even has one. "Any good recruitment specialist will tell you that we always have more vacancies than skills, but I am not convinced this is indicative of a shortage. It just means that we have to work harder and smarter to find the right skills."

He explains that "with CRM taking off like it has, consultants and CRM developers are in huge demand, and that is probably a good example of where the amount of skills needed for a new technology has not caught up with the demand."

However, he accedes that some skills are harder to find than others. "As new technologies and software are released, finding skills for new products is very difficult, as few people know these products," says Fluxman. "Currently, developers - especially Java and C# developers - are in huge demand and, although there are many juniors available, highly-skilled good developers are hard to come by."

He points out, though, that whatever the number attached to SA's skills shortage is, "it is not a static number". Fluxman says: "The world of ITC changes and advances so quickly that we will never be able to put a number on it; we will always have a need for good skills."

Filling the vacuum

The ITA serves on the board of the Information Systems Electronics and Telecommunication Technologies Sector Education and Training Authority (ISETT SETA), as well as the Presidential Advisory Council on Information Society and Development (PEAC).

Lehlokoe says: "It is important that policy and initiative decisions not be done in a vacuum... in the past there have been instances where the ITA or an employers' body was not included in such decisions, so we [the ITA] need to be more proactive. It is a completely different perspective [to that of SITA]."

So far, the ISETT SETA has been unable to quantify the ICT skills shortage. Minister of labour Membathisi Mdladlana recently said his office could do so, but was unable to back-up this statement with figures.

Senior Econometrix economist Tony Twine says there is "not a speck of data" available on the ICT sector and that it is "a total vacuum" as far as this is concerned.

The ITA has sent out questionnaires to its members in a bid to quantify the skills shortage, but says it first and foremost hopes to convince government this afternoon to find a standardised way of looking at the issue.

Lehlokoe explains that different people have different definitions for various ICT fields and positions: "There is no standardised format or methodology." He says this afternoon will serve as an introductory meeting between the ITA and the JIPSA secretariat, "and will define the way forward".