Depending on who you speak to, the South African ICT industry faces a critical shortfall of skills, or it doesn't have enough jobs for all of its experienced professionals. The contradictory picture points to a mismatch between the skills on offer and those in demand in a market that is going through some wrenching changes.
The industry, like many other sectors of the South African economy, has shed jobs as a result of the global economic downturn. Integrators like Gijima, end-user organisations like Absa and telecoms operators such as Cell C have all taken a knife to their headcount in recent months.
One reason SA's ICT industry has seen a recent round of retrenchments is simply that many enterprise IT users have put major new projects on the backburner because of budgetary constraints, says Gois Fouch'e, strategy and transformation manager at HP SA. Also, many companies are turning to shared services, often delivered remotely from other parts of the world to achieve cost efficiencies.
No fresh blood
There is a disconnect between the skills many ICT veterans have, and the skills the market needs. Many are unable or unwilling to reskill, says Fouch'e. What's more, many companies find it cheaper and easier to train a younger person in new technology than it is to reskill a more experienced and expensive resource to do the same job.
Yet, even in a down market, many software developers, high-end integrators and other ICT service providers continue to complain that their growth is constrained by a shortage of relevant skills. The 2011 ITWeb-JCSE Skills Survey, for example, suggests that current demand amounts to 20 000 to 30 000 job opportunities, or 10% to 15% of the total ICT workforce.
Two thirds of companies responding to the ITWeb survey reported that they are severely impacted by a shortage of ICT skills. According to recruiters and employers, application development, mobility, high-end infrastructure and analytics are just a few of the areas where the industry has a dearth of skills.
The nature of large projects and the underlying solutions are experiencing a tectonic shift.
Industry observers say a lack of fresh blood coming into the industry means this shortage will only grow over the next few years. What's more, the pace of change in the industry is accelerating and the skills base is not keeping up.
"The nature of large projects and the underlying solutions are experiencing a tectonic shift.
"Not only do we have to catch up with the traditional skills, but we have to transition, upskill, reskill or learn new skills fast in order to design and deliver on the new solutions," says Fouch'e.
Trends such as the cloud, mobile technology and big data are destroying some jobs and creating others. Today, we are talking about job roles that didn't even exist five years ago. The data scientist is one example, says Matumane Tshabalala, technology solutions manager of EMC Southern Africa.
The ICT industry is starting to face the same problem as SA's engineering sector, with experienced techies ageing out of the system and not enough young professionals coming up through the ranks to replace them, says Landelahni Amrop CEO Sandra Burmeister.
"Spending on infrastructure is increasing, but the number of graduates is not keeping pace," she says. "We're already seeing spiralling remuneration because of supply and demand in particular markets and we have a very weak pipeline for the future."
We're already seeing spiralling remuneration because of supply and demand in particular markets.
This is especially true of deep technical skills in specialised fields of the communications industry, for example billing systems and tower engineering. As the skills reservoir for Africa, SA's telecoms operators could feel even more pressure as scarce resources take up jobs to build infrastructure elsewhere on the continent, says Burmeister.
Big budgets win
Companies operating in the software development industry also bemoan a lack of skills to grow their businesses. They're particularly worried about the lack of fresh talent coming into the system from tertiary education institutions. "Everyone is worried about [the lack of skills] at the entry level," says Lorraine Steyn, director at software development firm KRS.
Mario Matthee, head of the Intern Programme at Cape Town software development firm DVT, reports a lack of both good entry-level people and intermediate skills. There are good mid-level and senior people around, but many of them are asking for huge salaries and constantly move around to increase their earning power.
"This makes it very competitive in the market. The guy with the biggest budget is going to win," says Matthee.
There's also a shortage of key senior skills such as business analysts and enterprise architects.
"We're seeing a definite shortage of software skills in South Africa - testing, analysts and developers - but infrastructure skills seem to be in good supply," says Harish Lala, VP and regional business head for Africa at Indian outsourcing firm Zensar.
Companies that operate at the higher end of the IT infrastructure market and rely on people with skills in storage, virtualisation and other complex technologies tell a similar story.
"The skills are not there for high-end solution provisioning. It is up to you as an organisation to grow and develop them yourself," says EMC's Tshabalala.
There's also a lack of people with strong management skills and experience in the local ICT industry, says Collin Govender, VP for human resources at T-Systems SA. "Additionally, the ICT industry is in dire need of Level 5 systems architects and project managers," he says.
Asked where the skills problem starts, many recruiters and IT employers point fingers at a tertiary education system that is not producing the quantity or quality of skills they need to run their businesses. But even before the workforce moves into the tertiary education system, high schools are not producing enough people with the maths and science marks they need to study IT-related degrees.
Slow evolution
Burmeister says the number of computer science and engineering enrolments at universities has increased significantly over the decade. However, the graduation rate has dropped to 12.5% over the past few years, compared to the international average of 25%.
Between 2005 and 2010, SA conferred an average of 1 700 university degrees in computer science and electrical and electronic engineering, and 3 130 Technikon diplomas a year. This is not nearly enough to meet burgeoning demand for skills, says Burmeister. The industry needs to market itself to high school students so that it can attract more high achievers to study ICT-related subjects at tertiary institutions, she adds.
The students who graduate from tertiary education emerge poorly prepared for the realities of the workforce and often find that companies are not willing to help them build practical experience.
Organisations need to invest a lot in graduate and internship programmes because the people who emerge from the universities are just not ready to be put to work on client projects, says Matthee.
Universities prepare people with theoretical understanding, not practical grounding, says KRS' Steyn.
"A lot of corporate employers are not willing to invest in that conversion [of theoretical understanding into practical experience]."
University curriculums are 'not in sync with what is happening in the market' and the institutions are too slow in evolving to keep up with the latest trends in the technology industry, says Michael de Andrade, MD of EnterpriseWorx. EnterpriseWorx isn't afraid to take on young, talented staff, but it does find it needs to conduct a lot of training in-house to bring them up to speed.
Plugging the gap
In the longer term, the industry and the education sector will need to take a more strategic and co-ordinated approach to building a skills base for the future. Industry bodies should work with the universities and technikons to bring syllabuses in line with industry needs, says Matthee.
Building the pool of ICT skills should not be a crude numbers game, warns Zensar's Lala. Although moves by government and the tertiary education sector to enhance ICT education are welcome, 'churning out people' from learning institutions won't by itself plug the skills gap. The industry needs to be ready to provide them with training and mentoring to equip them to work on live projects, says Lala. For now, it is small and mid-sized companies that are taking on the responsibility of turning new graduates into battle-ready professionals through internships, on-the-job training and mentoring.
"There is a lot more support for graduates at SMEs than there is at the corporate level," says KRS' Steyn. Her company runs an internship course that covers many areas neglected by training institutions, such as agile project management, test-driven development and domain-driven design.
Mid-sized companies are shouldering this burden without any help from the government in terms of subsidies or funding, says Matthee. Internship programmes involve a substantial commitment and smaller ICT companies could do more to create jobs and build skills with more support from the government.
In-house training helps to fill immediate skills gaps from entry level upwards, but it's a short-term solution, says Burmeister. To secure a sustainable base of skills for the future, organisations must make long-term investments in formal graduate programmes and implement formal career paths for their staff.
Achieving equity
On the employment equity front, the South African ICT industry is slowly but surely becoming more representative in terms of colour but not in terms of gender.
The number of black ICT graduates overtook the number of white graduates in 2002 and this trend has accelerated over time, with more than twice as many black than white graduates, says Burmeister. But male graduates still outnumber females by about two to one.
Competition for mid-level and management-level employment equity candidates is still fierce, however. "Previously disadvantaged individuals with high-end skills are still rare, so companies would fare better with their employment equity programmes by taking a long-term view," says Tshabalala. "Although the risk of job-hopping remains, there is a higher chance of retaining these professionals if they are offered opportunities to expand their knowledge and exposure."
T-Systems' Govender says the mistake many companies make as they roll out their employment equity strategies is that they don't place as much emphasis on growing the skills of their candidates as they do on recruiting them. This creates a skills gap within the middle to upper ranks of many companies.
Where are the women?
"Technology is still a male-dominated industry, especially the hardware business," says Tshabalala. The software development scene has attracted more women, but even here, gender equity is far from where it should be.
Far fewer women are applying for jobs at KRS than in the past, indicating that the field is becoming more rather than less male-dominated, says Steyn. Women accounted for around half of its development team 10 to 15 years ago, but today, around 90% of job applicants are men.
Steyn says that one possible reason for the sudden drop-off in female programmers may be that they have been put off the world of technology by the rise of a strongly male-dominated computer gaming culture in the past decade.
But more importantly, corporate culture in IT companies has become far more rigid than it used to be, she says. The business culture is less tolerant of flexible working hours, telecommuting and other perks that many women find attractive.
One silver lining for the South African ICT industry is that there has been a slight increase in the number of returning expats, who bring international experience back with them. HP has seen a definite slowdown in transfers of people from its local office to other parts of the world, says Fouch'e. Companies in many countries are ensuring that citizens are employed ahead of expats, which means there are fewer opportunities for South Africans abroad.
"The global economic crisis has resulted in a harsh environment for many ICT professionals in the US and Europe. But South Africa is still seen as a growing economy with tangible, attractive career prospects in this industry," says Tshabalala. In fact, EMC SA is using resources from Italy, France and the UK here because there is not much work for them at home.
First published in the September 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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