ICT skills survey highlights ongoing reality of South Africa’s skills gap

19th July 2016 By: Anine Kilian - Contributing Editor Online

ICT skills survey highlights ongoing reality of South Africa’s skills gap

When it comes to information and communication technology (ICT) skills, South Africa continues to fall behind its African peers, according to the University of the Witwatersrand’s Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE), which launched its seventh consecutive skills trends survey of the local ICT sector on Tuesday.

The survey forms part of the JCSE’s continuous effort to create a meaningful representation of South Africa’s ICT skills landscape and to provide an outline of the current skills priorities and gaps in the sector.

“Exposure to and familiarity with ICT for all learners is essential. Some laudable initiatives have appeared, such as the use of tablets in Gauteng schools, but they have yet to reach a sustained, critical mass for all grades of learners,” said JCSE applied research manager and author of the report Adrian Schofield, adding that ICT clients in South Africa were also cutting back on their own expenditures, owing to the state of the local economy.

The 2016 JCSE ICT Skills Survey suggests a that various players in the South African ICT sector, including government departments and agencies, commercial enterprises, nonprofit organisations and associations form a cohesive and coordinated team to meet and overcome challenges to address the skills gap.
 
The survey identifies six leading priorities for ICT managers, with information security emerging as the clear leader, followed by network infrastructure, software as a service/cloud computing, database development and application development.
 
In the report, the JCSE noted that technology developments had reached the stage of being referred to as “the fourth industrial revolution”, signalling the disruption of business models and labour dynamics.

The report explained that, while the introduction and increased use of new technologies would reduce the demand for labour used for white-collar roles and repetitive tasks, there was a converse demand for the specialised skills that created, implemented and maintained these new technologies.

“There is an immediate unsatisfied need for skills in the ICT sector that is only going to get worse in the medium and long term. Significant and sustained investment in education and training is required to have any hope of alleviating the skills gap,” said Schofield
 
JCSE director Professor Barry Dwolatzky added that previous editions of the survey referred to the optimism about potential growth in the African economy and the opportunity for investment in ICTs to fuel growth.

“There continues to be hopeful signs that the potential can and will be fulfilled,” he noted.
 
However, despite some positive developments, the report noted that political turmoil continued to inconvenience the lives of many Africans, often exacerbated by the effects of floods and droughts, while in South Africa, the economy showed worrying signs of sliding into a recession.

Similarly, political uncertainty and poor leadership have a negative impact on many sectors.

The report cited a failure to implement vital projects in the ICT sector, such as the switch to digital terrestrial television services and the implementation of the national broadband network.

“Our view is that the ICT skills gap in South Africa is a reality that continues to haunt the country’s ability to lift its performance across all sectors to the level that will sustainably address the unacceptable burdens of poverty and unemployment,” Dwolatzky added.