Quantifying the skills crisis

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2007

The communications department plans to map SA's ICT skills shortage by September, says deputy communications minister Roy Padayachie.

"The matter is quite urgent," he told ITWeb in an exclusive interview.

The deputy minister says it is generally agreed there is a qualifications deficit in the local ICT industry, although the extent of the crisis is entirely anecdotal and virtually no figures exist to quantify the national requirement.

"We want to be able to produce an interim report by the next meeting of the Presidential ICT Advisory Group, likely to take place this September," Padayachie says. "This will be a progress report on how we are acting on its recommendation to establish an ICT skills council."

Padayachie says the advisory group proposed the skills council to president Thabo Mbeki as a means to help address the skills crisis in the industry. ICT executives pointed out that the crisis was not unique to SA, but was a global phenomenon. They said a mismatch existed between the skills required by industry and what tertiary institutions produced.

The result was industry setting up its own training institutions to "right-skill" new staff, a process local industry leaders told Mbeki cost them as much, if not more, than importing a skilled individual from South Korea.

The deputy minister says from this was born the idea of a skills council, which in turn generated a need for figures. However, these statistics appear not to be available in any coordinated sense within government or industry.

"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.

"We are having discussions with the Ministry of Education and the Department of Labour and some other government departments, so here is an interdepartmental team that is looking at how we will bring this ICT skills council into place," says Padayachie. "The council will go a long way towards developing a guiding strategy that government can attempt to execute."

He says in the meantime, the department has commissioned its own desktop research on the skills deficit, using public domain information compiled by ITWeb and the Information Systems Electronics and Telecommunication Technologies Sectoral Education and Training Authority.

Padayachie says the document, dated April 2007 and titled Building ICT Skills in SA, has given the department some kind of preliminary assessment of what the skills deficit is.

Harold Wesso, the department's deputy director-general for policy development, says the report may be released in the next two weeks and will be a step towards taking the debate beyond thumb-suck figures.