South Africa – The ICT skills gap

South Africa’s ICT industry will face a serious skills crunch in the future unless it focuses on developing its young professionals.

Matumane Tshabalala, technology solutions manager of EMC Southern Africa, says the skills are not there for high-end solution provisioning.

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 Fouché, 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…

Choosen excerpts by JMM from

via Mind the ICT skills gap | ITWeb.